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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

An end to touring [PhotoTravel]

Finally I have reached home and I hope to be able to stay here (barring day-trips) until maybe February. It's been a busy three months - of the last ten weeks I've been home for two, so the family were using press photos to identify me when I came in through the door. In the midst of all the travel I have seen some beautiful things and some terrible things - you'll need to trawl the archives to see more - and even in flight some of the views were staggering, as I hope you can see from these photographs.

People often ask me why I need to travel so much in this era of the internet and of a massively connected society. The best answer I can provide them is to refer back to my experiences with collaborative conferencing in the early 90s. Our experiences showed us that the most effective person-to-person meetings (electronic - that was the name of the product) followed face-to-face meetings (physical ones). And indeed, the five hours of telephone conferences I have had today only worked in my opinion because all the parties involved well understood each other from physical meetings.

Even that has nothing to contibute to conferences, where I spend a large amount of my time. I have yet to see a 'virtual' presentation at a conference that has really worked - I have seen quite a few that have suffered technical disaster though. Personally, I need the buzz and reaction of an audience to do a good job (although the feedback so far from CSS makes me worry if I should maybe develop a new career...), and I can't imagine how anyone could give anything more than a cold lecture or a scripted pitch just to a camera.

So I guess I'll be travelling a little more - to get started with relationships, to give conference presentations - until the telepresence technology gets a whole lot better.

posted at 7:21 PM (UK) | |