In a post titled IL 2005 Redux, Erica Reynolds puts forth a cool idea:

Here’s what I think would be oh so cool for next year: instead of “tracks,” just post each one of the presentations on the IL06 site, and let us all tag them. Then, we’ll self-organize, and the coordinators will know which sessions have the most buzz, and likely the most attendees so they can plan the room size. But, it’s not really about buzz as much as it is letting the attendees self-select, and show (not just tell) the coordinators and presenters what it is about the presentations that they’re interested in. So all I want for IL06: tags, baby, tags.

What a great way to let your attendees tell you what the conference is going to be about. Then we’d want to have some tools to let us visualize relationships between tags (“hmm, it looks like most of the people who are tagging ‘blogs’ are also tagging ‘social_software’; maybe I should look into that, too”) , see which sessions the taggers are in agreement about, and which sessions are seeing a proliferation of tags (which might indicate that the session will be wide-ranging or might indicate that it is time to re-write the session description to make it clearer to the intended audience).

There is other good stuff in this post, including some thoughts about picking a (constructive) fight with vendors, and a glimpse at Erica’s to-do lists. And you need not have attended Internet Librarian to “get” this.