Euro IA, Barcelona

Eric Reiss mentioned that at conferences in the States you have pre-conference workshops, whereas in Europe you just have lots of drinking. At the start of Day Two of Euro IA – I’m feeling rather sleepy after the cumulative effects of the the pre-conference party, and all the tappas last night. Hope I can hold out for the rest of the proceedings today!

It’s been great to meet lots of people I’ve been corresponding with – and so many people with whom I’ve not but who know my name from my various rantings. So far, everyone’s been kind about me, which is nice – despite my hogging the mic on the floor on most sessions. I realise I abandoned my post somewhat at the poster session to talk to others about theirs, and take some of the 500+ photos that I’ve got to edit down when I get back…
So far my notes are full of things like sentiment analysis techniques (Peter Van Dijk), cognitive organisation of requirements (Wiebe & Confer) and the incredible amount of data that Yahoo! Spain crunches per week (Ricardo Baeza-Yates) among other things. Today there’s service design and cross-context IA and other stuff – but it’s a two-tracker so I can’t have all of it (and we leave early for the airport later this afternoon).
No doubt I’ll be expanding on some of these things in later posts (although I may do this on Stream since this is in fact an expensed trip) – there’s a lot to digest – and it’s all been top-flight stuff.