First, check out this year's conference proceedings pictured on the ledge of my hotel room window. It's a book that's just short of a REAM of paper. There's some good reading in there, but this chunk of paper is not a load I'm willing to bear this weekend. The sheer number of papers is another indicator of this year's record attendance.

The conference keynote speaker was Dr. BJ Fogg, Director of Stanford's Persuasive Computing Laboratory (for which I am now an affiliate corporate sponsor). BJ gave a storied, and at times humorous, overview of his work at the intersection of human persuation and computers, a discipline called captology. He showed many good examples of good and bad captology, presented some unpublished theoretical models, and ended with some words of wisdom on how people can effect change in their personal lives.

- mike lee - montreal