I wonder what readers’ experiences were of the IAB conference in Croatia at the start of the month.  I know that some delegates had a terrible time with the organisation – what were your impressions?  Additionally, what was your impression of the standard of papers?

For myself, I was happy to see that those whom I thought would be worth hearing were worth hearing; and there was a good number of papers that were a genuine pleasure to attend.  On the other hand, there was also a number of papers that I thought were (ahem) somewhat less than inspiring.  One or two made me wish that I’d stayed in bed spent a bit more time in the sea gone to other sessions.  And a couple was just hilariously bad.  Here’s a clue: any paper that starts with the phrase “I would like to invite you to come on a journey with me…” should have alarm bells ringing.  And when people are wearing costumes…  Just: no.

Other thoughts?  Who impressed you?  What impressed you?  And what made you want to run away and hide?