Thanks to the HCSNet, I was in Melbourne for a couple of days, as I mentioned before I left. Though search has not traditionally been my field, with my current work in text summarisation, I am moving into more related areas. It was therefore interesting to see what sort of things are being done in the field.

There were a number of interesting people in attendance including Jon Patrick from Sydney, and Ross Wilkinson from CSIRO Canberra. Also, Peter Bruza was there, who I recognized as the Australian (in this context he wasn't the only one :D) who spoke at the Blog Symposium I went to in Stanford earlier in the year.

Of course the highlight of the two days was the talk by the young dynamic researcher talking about personality in blogs. His talk had it all: interesting findings, entertaining presentation and delivery, and some very interesting ideas for potential directions in search.

Of course I was talking about me. Got some interest in my idea to search by personality (or more generally style) of the author rather than content of the text. I also got invited to give a talk back at Macquarie by the people at CSIRO. They had a cancellation, so I can do it in a couple of weeks rather than waiting until next year!

On the whole I'm not sure how successful the workshop was in fostering future relationships: there seemed to be a lot of personal issues brought to the table. I hope all the people who wanted something from it got what they needed. I'll let you know if anyone gets in touch wanting me on their team.