"The presenters were nearly uniformly offline people" The phrase "offline people" really captures something. It's not literally true, I guess - I'm sure most of those people use the web, email etc - but there's such a big divide between people who do that, and people who participate actively in online communities. - Michael Nielsen

There really wasn't any citing of online conversation either. Cameron got cited in the opening keynote by Lee Dirks of Microsoft and then nothing. - John Dupuis

And at a certain level I realize that my characterization is probably unfair. It's just the contrast between ICSTI and BookCamp as well as ScienceOnline and various other conferences was so striking. Maybe I'm just spoiled. - John Dupuis

Most scientific conferences in my field of research are still like "Managing Data for Science" with very little online activity. But I see small signs that things are slowly changing. Surprisingly, Twitter seems to be easier to understand and adopt than blogging. - Martin Fenner

this is actually becoming a serious problem for me - I'm finding it really hard sometime to summon the patience to talk to (some not all!) "offline" people because they are so far behind the leading edge of a lot of conversations. That sounds incredibly arrogant I know but with limited time it gets so frustrating going over the same ground over and over again... - Cameron Neylon

That's the trouble being better than everyone else Cameron, people tend to think you're arrogant. ;) I got an email from one of my 'offline' friends this morning saying 'check this out!' with a link to Wolfram Alpha. - Andrew Lang

How many "online" people are there in fact? Sometimes I think it is about 12 ;-) (now standing by to be shot.) - Maxine