Conference venue, Conference logo, yours truly's hotel room view Your correspondent struggles to write an objective announcement this time: with hair still wet from the sea, pleasantly tired feet from a coastal hike, a God-exists hotelroom view and a delicious diner coming, her mind is under the impression that its owner is either daydreaming or on holiday. Alas. She is at Solstrand - the Scandinavian version of paradise - not to drink Mojitos and hang out on pristine beaches, but for the F1 Future of Russian conference, which starts tomorrow. This event more or less marks the official start of the Bergen-based research project Future of Russian: Language Culture in the Era of New Technology, about which we blogged earlier.The coming days, Michael Gorham, Sergei Kuznetsov, Vera Zvereva, Catherine Nepomnyashchy-Theimer, Russian Cyberspace's Henrike Schmidt, Gasan Gusejnov, Martin Paulsen, and several other RuNet practitioners and scholars meet in Solstrand for a series of presentations, discussions and informal brain storm sessions on Russian new media and language culture. Topics and themes at stake are, among others, the sites bash.org.ru (Alexander Berdichevsky) and gramota.ru (Michael Gorham), writers' websites (Tine Roesen), adolescents' (Vera Zvereva) and writers' blogs (myself), discussions of the Soviet past in the blogosphere (Sergei Kuznetsov), and much, much, more. The conference itself is not public - although ofcourse, in the unlikely event that you are a Russian-new-media scholar and are near us, you are more than free to join - but the paper abstracts are. The conference page brings you to a full overview of the program, and on the abstract page, you find summaries of the talks in PDF format. In addition, we'll be back here with some afterthoughts next week - once the seasand has finally been washed out of our hair.ER