conference overview

Alot of interesting info at the conference I attended yesterday. A few practical things (how to use handheld scanners to do inventory -- looks labor intensive but not hard) and an glimpse into captivate for creating tutorials.

The social technologies program was most interesting. For one, the presenter demoed my favorite web 2.0 video. ;-)
Mostly, I was interested to see how many libraries in that group are NOT blogging or using social networking in some ways.
del.icio.us and blogs seem to be the most obvious and useful of the current "hot" tools. I am working on wrangling a bunch of departmental links into del.icio.us now. I mean, it seems downright silly to maintain a html links list these days. Why in the world would anyone want to do that? So that you can organize it the way you want? Do it with flickr bundled tags. So that you can style it the way you want? Pull in your bundled tag feeds into a sidebar (as I've done here). Easy, easy. ;-)

I really need to take a serious look at the wiki stuff. I've contributed to a few wikis (internal project management sorts of wikis, edits in wikipedia, etc.) but I'm interested to see if a wiki can be turned into a documentation manual, in other words as a means of document control. I have a wiki setup but I need to finish up the del.icio.us stuff and get everyone up to speed on that before I go forward with the wiki.

Also, I still need to finish up the online e-learning/training tutorial created for staff. In talking to a colleague with an IDD background, we came up with a couple of neat ideas. I also got a few neat ideas from the ms ppt user group at google (a treasure trove of info for those of you seeking advanced help on ppt!) Of course, nothing like thinking you have finished, only to find that the best ideas have come up. ;-)

Also, a brief discussion of twitter. Twitter is just a timewaster. Maybe it has useful applications as it seems that some people are using it in interesting ways... but you know, when it comes down to it, there is always SOMETHING more important that needs doing...and if you start twittering, do not blame me. ;-)