the research triangle

Last Thursday, I entered The Research Triangle for the ScienceOnline09 conference. It was a place of both shadow and substance, both things and ideas. It was a place where the cryptic elements of the blogosphere manifested in three dimensions; personalities known only through pixelated text subject to the imagination took on faces and voices that would forever alter my perception of the messages flashing next to the user names I encounter every day as an administrator of ScienceBlogs. But unlike The Bermuda Triangle where people are rumored to disappear due to the activities of paranormal…