Bubbles in the Bathtub

Thanks for the posts... nice to know everyone is having a grand time in Costa Rica!! Wish they would go live with web broadcasting of the sessions for those of us who are stuck back in the office... oh well, maybe one of these days!!

Thanks for the recordings of the opening day. That was especially nice to hear the piano music and Rod's opening comments.

Good comment, David.

I will say this, for the very first time, there was a 2-room 'Cafe Internet' at this symposium with which people could check their email and go to some sites of interest. That was a great start.

Maybe Thane Wibbles and the folks at the Savannah Symposium could take it one step further and provide some on-line capabilities like a streaming video camera at the sessions and maybe even a chat room or instant messaging capability that you could temporarily log onto during the sessions (and the banquet/workshops, etc). Do other folks have some other ideas on this? Let's get a discussion going if you're interested.

Dean Hey
"Surfing for SeaTurtles - - -"

On the surface webcasting seems like a good idea, but in reality how many people are going to use it. There are two major factors, how many people are not at the symposium to watch a streaming web feed, and how many of those have a broadband connection suitable for streaming video.

Another problem is that streaming video would be pretty useless for the oral presentations. It is too dark in the conference hall to get a good image and the resulting video is so small that you couldn't make anything out anyway.

I tried some tests this year and the only thing that might be useful would be streaming audio of the presentation. This would have the added benefit of using less bandwidth so more people could handle the stream.

I had intended to try streaming much of the program this year (seaturtle.org has a streaming quicktime server), but one of the only places that didn't have an internet connection for some strange reason was the conference hall. Perhaps they didn't want people surfing the web during the presentations :) If the same wireless connection had been available there as was available in the lobby, symposium office, poster room and internet cafe it would have been possible.

The same general comments go for chat and instant messaging. The sea turtle community does not currently use these services and it is not clear to me that they would use them during the symposium. If a clear desire could be defined for these services it might be worth setting up, otherwise these services are expensive and technically non-trivial to set-up in a conference setting.