Well, the conference ended today without much fanfare… mostly as most
people (myself included) took off before the last session. The
highlight today was Rob Glaser’s keynote. Rob is the
Founder & CEO of RealNetworks, where I spent about 2.5 years and MK a
year before me. I was hoping for a good talk… and it was OK, if pretty
devoid of content. The problem with it, and frankly with lots of
keynotes, is that they lack one of the four required (IMHO) components
for a useful keynote. They are:

1. A real problem. The speaker should describe what problem is being
talked about here.

2. Issues with solving the problem. Presumably, if the problem is worth
talking about, there are some issues with solving it.

3. Relevant technology. Presumably, the relevant technology at the
conference is helping in some way. How?

4. Call to action. Finally, the audience should be able to understand
what they can do, if they so choose, to help solve the issues being faced.

Rob’s speech was a classic Industry Product Line speech. He describe a
bunch of products and why they were interesting, but didn’t touch on why
technology being developed within the WWW community was helpful, nor did
he present any avenues for people at the conference to do some work in
the area. Granted, he’s probably used to pitching to businesses to work
together vs a research audience, but still.

Anyway, at least he gave a decent talk and said RealNetworks would
rejoin the W3C after lapsing their membership… although I wonder if
somebody will get around to filling out the form by next year.

Jin, Frank McSherry and I trucked into Shinjuku after the conference. The
rough part was hauling my luggage through the Shinjuku station… the
place is huge! And I thought wandering through the Tokyo station at
night on Wednesday was bad. Basically, from where we got off the train
at Shinjuku to the hotel, it’s one subway stop on one of the lines —
so it’s a bit. What is surprising is how much is underground or built
over. Anyway, we walked for maybe 30 minutes, and then had to go up a
couple decent flights of stairs with the baggage. That’s the only thing
that really sucked. Jin and I then went over to Yodabashi Camera - a
huge electronics outfit - to get a zoom lens for the camera. After the
baseball game, I figured I’d need a telephoto for any kind of
interesting shots at sumo on Sunday. This was relatively painless, but
it’s nice to have someone who speaks the language!

Frank & I then had some OK sushi at a place next door. The building was
a triangular tube — down the middle, it was open. We ate on the 50th
floor, so it was somewhat interesting looking down at a 50 story drop on
the inside! But it was all glass covered, so no way to accidentally fall
in. Still, it’s a bit weird to have random restaurants and such on the
upper floors of a building… I’m too used to having them either on the
top floor or bottom floor!