Richard Campbell Blogs Too

Now that the body of the conference is underway, Greg and I settle into a routine. We hang out at the Virtual TechEd FishBowl and do interviews all day. For the IT Forum Virtual Side the interviews tend to be short - only five minutes or so. For Virtual TechEd the interviews are longer, 15-25 minutes or so. And then there's RunAs Radio - sometimes we do the interview in the FishBowl, but since its audio-only, that's not required, so we'll sneak off to some quiet corner, often the speakers lounge, to do the interview there.

We certainly don't do all the interviews, Tony Krijnen and Daniel van Soest from the Virtual Side have been handling most of them, and in some cases the interviewee comes with an interviewer. But when Tony and Daniel are booked and there's an interview to be done, Greg or I will step in. Its good fun.

Around lunch time we head for the Community Lounge in the vendor's hall to host the second wave of Speaker Idol. And for the first time ever (as far as I know, anyway), we had a women competitor in Speaker Idol - Maral Topalian from Lebanon. To top if off, Maral won wave two!

In the evening Greg and I went to the Women in Technology dinner. No, we're not women, but we weren't the only men there either. It wasn't a large group, only around 30 or so, but it was a fascinating discussion from my point of view. As a father of two daughters who are technically savvy (they really have no choice in the matter), hearing the challenges of women working in technology surprised me.