I’m back from Etech, and waiting for the jetlag to kick in. I managed to stay awake until about 10pm last night, and awoke around 7am this morning, so hopefully I’ll get tired earlyish this evening, and work my way back into a normal sleep pattern, rather than the usual flying east jetlag where I can’t get to sleep until 4am. As I didn’t get to stop off on the east coast for a couple of days on the way back (as I’ve done for all my west coast visits in the last 6 or 7 years) I’m 8 hours out of sync rather than 5, so I’m not sure what difference that’ll make.

Etech itself was interesting, and fun. I found the Social Software tracks the most interesting, but was very disappointed in all the camera-phone sessions – I don’t know if it’s just a UK/EU difference, but I really didn’t come across anything interesting or new there.

Marc Smith and Donald Norman gave excellent keynotes, but Pertti Korhonen and William H. Janeway were really dull.

My main complaint about the conference as a whole is that most of the talks were too long, with not enough depth. 20 minutes would have worked much better than 40 for the vast majority of them – especially if there really was an abundance of great proposals.