I’ve just been listening to the Eastercon Fan GoH session in which Greg Pickersgill interviewed Bill and Mary Burns. I say “listening advisedly” because while the sound quality was superb the video was very blocky and it was only because I knew the people involved that I could picture what I was seeing. Fortunately, for this particular event, sound was pretty much all you needed.

The event was streamed on the LXtra channel at Ustream. People kept popping in and out, but there were generally 10 or 12 people online. Geri Sullivan was there, and other people from the US. For those of us online there was a chat window, which was quite useful, though it would have been good to have a link to a list of IRC chat commands somewhere off the screen for the benefit of newbies.

The feed did drop a number of times during the panel. I believe the problems were at the LX end, in that the hotel wi-fi wasn’t playing ball and Peter Sullivan had to get the feed out using a mobile broadband signal. I do hope his phone bill isn’t through the roof this month. To do video properly you really need a good quality wired connection, but those often come rather expensive in hotels. Still, kudos to Peter and Steve Green for making this happen.

As to the event itself, Greg did a great job with the interview, though several of the online audience were disappointed that he didn’t ask Bill about efanzines.com at all. There was, however, a certain amount of heavy irony in having an event that reached out to fans around the world that featured people for whom even Eastercon was deemed “too large”. Other opinions expressed during the interview were that masquerades should be scrapped and that modern conventions have too much programming. And that, of course, is why we still have things like Corflu, so that people who want that sort of event can get it.