When you reach the half way point of the year, and you still have posts from last year, you know you've been slack. To all those people who have been reading, if nothing else I need to let you know that this blog is not dead. Blogademia is not just another statistic, though it has been on hiatus. I've had to focus all my efforts on my work on text summarisation - I've been coding my touche off making all sorts of web based tools.

But that's not to say things haven't been happening quietly in the background. So I thought I'd just chuck a few things out there, along with the requisite promise to be back soon to write more.

• First up, belated congratulations to my esteemed colleague Dr Alastair Gill, who has taken up his new position at Northwestern University in Chicago.
• We're currently working on a revision of our journal submission. The reviews we got back were very encouraging and positive, and we look forward to doing them justice.
  
• Alastair will be presenting a poster summarising this paper at next week's 17th Annual Meeting of the Society for Text and Discourse to be held in Glasgow.
• I've been doing a number of reviewing spots recently: for JCMC; for the persistent conversation track at Hawaii International Conference on System Science; and for the Texas Linguistics Society for which I have been invited to be on the program committee.

So as you can see my finger is very much still on the pulse, I'm still in the game. I just need to do it here more often.