Mary, Denise and other AoIR-ers I was another one who laughed during Mel's presentation. I was also one who was interviewed for Jean's Flickr presentation and am glad she picked someone else's family room to illustrate how we Flickr folks live. ;) (She did take a photo of mine.) Knowing that was Jean's blog with the word count obsession post, knowing her sense of humour, and knowing she is due to submit her thesis shortly, I happily laughed and kept laughing even when she said "it's not funny". Jean is also an editor and would be enforcing word counts for other people all the time, so there is that side of it too. I agree with Denise's comment about the fonts. They can be so expressive. Clancy Ratliff's "Culture Cat" blog on Rhetoric and Feminism used to have a wonderful retro font called "Beauty School Dropout" for the title. (I'm into fonts so I know things like that.) I don't know why Clancy changed it. (Culture Cat is no longer a PhD blog so Mel didn't present it this time.) Mary it is a pity you had to catch that flight and couldn't be there for the whole session. It was the liveliest session of all that I went to, and afterwards as we broke up into conversational groups to leave the room, the pitch of the conversation was more like a party than a conference. I don't think there was any animosity. Pam Pamela Rosengren Graduate Student, Internet Studies, Curtin University of Technology