Gary Gale

O2, the UK Telefonica brand and soon-to-be-loosing-the-iPhone-exclusivity-to-just-about-anyone mobile operator, have a reputation which is, to be honest, just a little bit crap. Their coverage in the rural wilds of Central London, especially around Soho and Covent Garden, seems to be scaled for a single user and a web searchfor "o2 customer service problems" throws up such gems as "O2 customer service consists of PAY UP OR ELSE" and "O2's customer service has to be the poorest I have ever come across".

(This post was originally written for theYahoo! Developer Network blogand was published there on October 5th; it's duplicated here for posterity.)You're stuck in a room on the first floor of a venue with no natural light, people keep expressing surprise that you're there, there's a bizarre voucher system operating for getting a cup of coffee and the free public wifi is holding up far better than the venue's net connectivity which is buckling under the strain of multiple laptops, iPhones and Androids.It can only be a tech conference; this one is in London and it's called FOWA, or the Future of Web Applications to give it its full name and it was held in the rather grand sounding Kensington and Chelsea Town Hall, near High Street Kensington tube station.There's a booth with some strangely comfortable sofas and chairs, a purple orchid, loads of purple swag, "geoballs" and a free wifi point called yahooligans.

It's been almost two weeks since one of these posts; I've been pretty much conferenced out, with FOWA London taking up a sizeable chunk of last week and the AGI's GeoCommunity mopping up any spare time the week before that.

The hallmark of any successful tech conference is appallingly bad wifi which, despite the best protestations of the conference organisers, always buckles under the strain around 30 minutes into the opening keynote. All of which has meant that my Delicious account has been on a bit of a diet recently, but here's what did make it through the wifi ...* Yet more bacon products make it to market. Most of them are novelty value only but surely there's scope for bacon flavoured mayo, for those moments when the perfect BLT is just out of reach? * Twickenham Fire Station tested its' air raid siren last week and memories of the Protect and Survive public service announcements on British TV at the height of the Cold War came flooding back. * My talk's at the AGI GeoCommunity conference seemed to get people talking; both seriously and somewhat tongue in cheek and I also managed to out the (neogeographer) Geoweb chair as an old school paleogeographer. * The CEO of the company I work for finally managed to achieve the accolade of being faked on Twitter. * And the source of all the crop circles was finally found in a town in the US with a strangely familiar name.

Posted via email from Gary's Posterous

Ever noticed how you never see some people in the same room together? Various conspiracy theories abound on this theme; that they're really the same person or that they're mortal enemies. All complete rubbish of course but maybe there's some truth in this after all ... I've never been publicly seen in the same room as Aaron Cope and Tom Coates before.

Day two of the AGI GeoCommunity conference and the conference as a whole has ended. We discussed neogeography, paleogeography and pretty much all points in between, finally agreeing that labels such as these get in the way of the geography itself. I was fortunate enough to have my paper submission accepted and presented a talk on how to Know Your Place at the end of the morning's geoweb track. The paper is reproduced below and the deck that accompanies it is on SlideShare.

Day one of this year's AGI GeoCommunity conference saw the geoweb track draw a sizeable, if varying, share of the delegate audience; some sessions were crammed tight and reduced to standing room only whilst others had a slightly less cozy but still enthusiastic crowd.