Avian’s Blog

I'll be spending the next week in Alexandria, at this year's Wikimania. I was at the first Wikimania in Frankfurt three years ago and it has been a pleasant experience (if I forget the desperate search for working wireless, but I guess that is mandatory at such events).

I wonder how much the conference has grown in these years. I remember Frankfurt as a nice, relatively small scale event. Halls were full of discussions about Wikipedia trivia and inside jokes (a lot of which I didn't get at that time) and Jimmy Wales was a kind of a celebrity everyone wanted to meet in person. I also recall the bad opinion I got about Richard Stallman from the way he answered questions at that conference. My impressions are still available at Cyberpipe's webpage by the way (Slovene text over English comment spam: day 1, day 2, day 3)

This year I'll be giving a 20 minute talk about Wikitag, the automatic link generation system I developed for Zemanta and a related lightning talk about an open-source MediaWiki dump preprocessor Wikiprep. So, if you're interested in the magic behind Zemanta's suggestion service and you'll be on that continent next week, you're kindly invited.