Conference Culture Contd

Increasingly, conferences award best papers/posters. (I heard that) WWW09 awarded the best paper and poster awards to resp:

Hybrid Keyword Search Auctions Ashish Goel (Stanford University) Kamesh Munagala (Duke University)

Purely URL-based Topic Classification Eda Baykan (EPFL) Monika Henzinger (EPFL & Google Zürich) Ludmila Marian (EPFL) Ingmar Weber (EPFL)

Congrats to all! Further, perpetual conversation about conferences (lance, noam) continues over dinner: WWW09 has Prof Dame Wendy Hall giving a dinner talk about "A Tale of Two or Three Conferences". She asks, "Why do we make life so difficult for ourselves by constantly spinning off new conferences? Why indeed in this digital age do we still feel the need to physically attend conferences?"