Some IL05 thoughts

I’ve been chewing over things since I got back from Internet Librarian last week. I’ve been spending the week teaching people the difference between “save” and “save as” and showing librarians how to insert pictures into text documents and the whole simultaneous blogging, and even the giant calculators seems like a distant memory. I do know that it was wonderful to be at a conference with so many smart people and not have to have some of the tired old discussions that I have at some ALA functions where I feel that I have to justify having a laptop or teaching an email class in a library setting. I also felt like a lot of the things people were talking about tended towards making things more usable — more findable, more explicable, more understandable — now that we’re over the love affair with just having gadgets. The trend towards openness, though we have a ways to go as a profession, makes me cautiously optimistic. I welcome this evolution and I’m impressed and honored to get to hobnob with people who are getting to make really Big Decisions in the library world.

That said, I gave my talk as part of the “Jenny and Jessamyn” show and it went well, even though it was short. I like to keep my high tech chops in order and as my Dad says “tell them something they don’t already know.” Unlike almost every other talk I’ve given, by the time I got to the B&B Andrea and I were staying at, there were already five or six ten blogs that had posted about my speech. It made my toes tingle. I could feel something really great, just around the corner. I came home with ideas and a renewed sense of purpose which I’m pretty sure is what these things are all about. Here are the links to people talking about my talk, go meta yourselves out.

me: blah blah blah blog

Rebecca Blood wrote one of the first blogs I ever read. She turned out to be a local contact and good friend. Her husband Jesse James Garrett helped me with the design of the very first librarian.net pages and is an early and continuing inspiration. When I went fishing around for a date for their wedding, I met my current boyfriend Greg through his blog. It’s been a pleasure having all of these people in my online and offline world. Rebecca is starting a series of blogger interviews on her site. She did one with Matt Haughey [of MetaFilter, Creative Commons and and PVRblog fame], and this months she’s done an interview with me. I talk about stats, birdwatching and why this blog doesn’t have comments.