WCIT 2008

I have been absent from my blog for a while now. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, it is said. Is it true in the case of blogging?

Anyway, for those of you who have been having cardiac arrests due to my (undeclared) leave of absence, the good news is that I am back. But there is a bad news too. I might be travelling again end of this week so a few more days of abstinence (from blogging) loom on the horizon.

Now where was I? Well, I was sort of blogging but elsewhere. I was in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) for about a week covering the World Congress of Information Technology (WCIT 2008). It is the biggest event for the techies of the world--also dubbed as the Olympics of IT. The venue was KLCC.

We (my office) were the official media partners of the event and as such, I was part of the team that produced the show dailies (newspapers that are produced everyday for thousands of delegates attending the conference). In addition, I was maintaining a blog, complete with videos (check them out under Multimedia on the blog) and pictures. It was all so hectic but quite fun on the whole. I even tried podcasting and ran some trials but when the actual event kicked off, there was hardly any time to produce podcasts. Reporting, production of videos and the blog consumed all my time and energy.

The event was a great success--said to be the best ever in the history of WCIT. Among the many panel discussions, there was one that got me most excited. It was about the future of the internet. One of the panelists, a Microsoft representative, summed it up so beautifully. The internet that we have now is just the beginning, he said. It's like language has been invented but Shakespeare is yet to arrive, he said. Doesn't that make you think about the future of the net? Doesn't that sound so thrilling?