It happened once again. The most important conference on the Web was hosted in Beijing, China.

Fortunately, I was able to attend it once again, but only after an entire week on vacations. I have to say that I loved China. A huge country, filled with great, kind people. I had the chance of having three buddies with me on this trip, which was great!

Shanghai. For those who know (and like) New York City, you will feel comfortable in Shanghai. A very cosmopolite city, filled with skyscrapers. Lots of excellent street food (even for a vegetarian like me). Lots of bargaining, which I translated into a shiny new Canon EOS 40D for half the price, and a brand new Sony Cyber-shot T300. You can see their quality in my Flickr account.

Beijing. The great city in the north. A HUGE city, may I say. Had the pleasure of travelling to the Great Wall, more specifically to the Mutianyu section.

Conference days. I presented on W4A, which I was attributed with the best paper award. Great news! On the second day I presented on WebEvolve, the Web Science Workshop. The next three days were enjoying the main WWW conference, with excellent keynote speeches, excellent papers (some Google guys presented there a PageRank for images), and excellent food.

I deeply recommend everyone to go to China when possible. And WWW, well, it continues with its excellency on research and industry.

This is just a short post (almost a la Twitter). I'm back, refueled and ready to jump right into work.

For those who might be interested, I've managed to read David Yallop's In God's Name, José Rodrigues dos Santos' A Fórmula de Deus (a Dan Brown -esque portuguese novel about trying to find a scientific answer about the existance of God), a book about Ireland's history, a geographical encyclopedia volume about the Northern Europe, and a small book about Chopin and his contemporary fellows.

I've also tinkered over my drawing and typographic skills by practicing ambigrams, specially to create the logotype of my prototype band/musical project (more on it on some future post), Winterfall.

Talking about music, yes, I'm still playing the guitar and composing. My stack of guitar riffs and melodies has grown (my latest count is around 70 or 80 of them), where the latest are exploring the difficult art of mastering dissonance on harmonies, melodies, and phrases. Someday I might post something about it.

The last two weeks were really really interesting. So interesting that my initial plans on blogging while at the conference went straight to the garbage bin, especially coped with the average 5 hours sleep I was able to get there.

The first four days at Banff were simply beautiful. Surrounded by the rocky mountains at the Douglas Fir, I managed to wake up every morning and go skiing with a bunch of good friends from all around the world on the Sunshine Village ski resort. In one word: beautiful. I even managed to do some black diamond runs, no way I could've imagined myself doing it... But as a matter of fact, I did :) Awesome!

Returning to reality, being a volunteer for WWW and presenter for W4A, some things had to be done. Moving to the jawdropping Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, with an insane window view towards mountains, river, golf course, snow, forest... simply beautiful. It was a good omen, I thought. And I was right. It was.

W4A started. There were several interesting presentations over Web 2.0 technologies and how to leverage them regarding accessibility. Some more technical, others geared towards research, but nevertheless interesting. My presentation went fine, despite some anxiety (oh, so typical of me...), got a bunch of interesting questions.

On the second day, as an assigned volunteer for W4A's room (thanks John!), I got to see the rest of the conference, and think about my own research goals. That's what conferences are for.

Heading to WWW itself, I was pleased to have the chance of hearing and seeing lots of great presentations on Browsers and User Interfaces, advances on standards from W3C's Technical Track, some cute demos on the Developers' Track, and loads and loads of Information Retrieval and Semantics. Concerning the plenary keynotes, they were simply great. Hearing Tim talking about WSRI - Web Science Research Initiative - and viewing those simple state charts summarizing the whole research process for the emergence of the Web Science field (and other Internet gimmicks such as e-mail) was definitely insightful. And viewing the Web as a set of linked data (as Brian reported), coupled with some chat I've managed to make with Brian Kelly, Peter Brusilovsky, people from the DAISY Consortium, and others, I managed to flourish several thoughts and research directions for my PhD work.

Summing it all up: it's a must-go-to conference every year, it's a must-go-to place to be on vacations when possible!