Home safe and sound to my lovely family. Here are some random thoughts to clear out of my head before going to bed, though I expect I’ll have a little more to say about the conference in days to come.

• This was the best conference I have been to in a long time. The well-defined focus and relatively small attendance (I’m comparing to ALA) made most every session feel relevant. The keynotes provided a common frame of reference, and were of uniformly high quality. Reminded me of a library conference with a very different focus, the annual RBMS preconference.

• I think I fulfilled my major expectations for the conference. I met almost all the bloggers that I was hoping to meet, and made friends with some cool people with cool noms de blog (Sarah Houghton, aka the Librarian in Black and Michael Porter, aka Libraryman); I learned about new software and trends; I had many of my current assumptions about the value of social software to libraries confirmed, while seeing some great twists on familiar ideas; I dang near blogged my brains out; and I’m ready to go back and do more cool stuff at my library.

• Asked of me at the end of a session by Erica Reynolds after we’d introduced ourselves:
  

  Her: “Are you Libraryman?”
  Me: “Er, no. But I met Libraryman!”

• Free wireless internet is fantastic, and, even though the coverage was spotty, it seemed like Internet Today was doing its best to provide it. Now, if we could only find a way to provide free, wireless power, we’d be all set.

• Looks like the photo at right is the only picture of me at the conference that made it up to Flickr. A stunning likeness, don’t you think?

• Blogging the conference in the way that I did–writing up just about every session I attended in great detail–is insane. It was a great thing for me to do once; next time I’ll probably aim to post two or three times a day, hitting the high points and the things that stayed with me. Now, I will certainly go back to posting a few times a week rather than a few times a day.

• That said, it has been very cool to go from having a blog with zero traffic to getting many page loads per day, with presenters from the conference commenting on the posts (sometimes objecting to my characterization of the session!). It’s nice to know that if you take the time to put commentary out there, people respond.

• Hearing the tales of public librarians whose administrations or IT departments won’t let them install software, un-install filters, use IM, etc., etc., ad nauseum, made me very glad to work for a private college. I suggested a program for next year should be “What to do when you boss/IT department balks at your way cool idea.”

• The other panel we need next year is “Google: J’accuse!” where Google could send a high-level executive with the green light to answer the tough questions that librarians want to ask about policy, technology, etc. A pipe dream, I know.

• My Monterey cabbie used the word “gnarly” in a sentence.

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