My involvement in the Perl community has so far been a purely virtual one (via CPAN and Perlmonks), but I would really like to visit a conference or join a Perl users group. I made a first step into this direction by visiting the Blog Hackers Conference 2005 today, a three-hour event with speeches centred around O'Reilly Japan's Blog Hacks book. There were two longer presentation by the book's two authors and a number of lightning talks, held by people working for companies like Hatena or Livedoor. Everything was in Japanese, of course (the rate of foreigners was at most three in about 150, same as the rate of women), so my understanding was limited to the technical aspects and all the jokes eluded me (there was a lot of laughter, so I guess it was funny).

The conference was organised by O'Reilly, the IT school were it took place (Digital Hollywood, Graduate School of Digital Content) and the Shibuya Perl Mongers, who I am slowly trying to approach, which is difficult, since they do not seem to have regular meetings, and if they do, they announce them on Mixi (an immensely popular example of these silly social network services where you cannot read anything unless you sign up, a concept that I protest by not signing up) rather than on their web-site or mailing list. My mid-term goal here is the YAPC::Asia, which is rumoured to be hosted by Shibuya.pm next year.