Blogger Conference, Huashan Cultural Park

A policeman watches traffic in front of a metro station in Yungho.

Saturday began bright and early with a trip to Taipei where I was speaking at blogger conference at Huashan Culture Park. The park was a former winery from Japanese times, and is now a venue for performing arts and conferences. Ironically, the park was in the news that morning with accusations of bid-rigging.

It was a brilliant day in Taipei.

The Huashan Culture Center

Complete the sentence.

The beautiful grounds.

Creating posters.

The old buildings have been left standing, though converted to other uses.

A worker holds up a poster.

I walked over to the nearby Starbucks to grab breakfast. On the way I noticed some media trucks on Ba De Rd. I stopped to talk to one of the men standing around. "Oh, it's nothing," he assured me. "They have to have news, so they just make it up." The full irony of the comment hit me when I later realized he must have been a security guard for TVBS....

Another bright Taipei day.

The canonical city shot: a homeless man under a bridge.

Back in the park I took a moment to enjoy the information.

The room where I spoke. The venue left a lot to be desired, speakers in the other rooms being easily heard, and the funky angles in the walls and ceiling breaking up voices. In addition to the blogging speakers, the geeks from Mozilla were there to talk about Firefox 3, and there were several other technical speakers as well. It was a huge conference.


David Reid, who was there with Scott Sommers representing the Taiwan English blogosphere, snapped this photo of me speaking. I gave my talk in Chinese, the first time I've ever done that. I don't think I did a very good job, too nervous and aware that my audience wanted to go to lunch. Basically I just gave a short outline of how I saw the English blogworld, what my blog was about, and why me of all people was there. Still, they were a good audience, supportive, and willing to laugh at my jokes. Once in a while.

[Taiwan]