LSW presenters

Originally uploaded by Hatchibombotar.

In the past 36 hours, I have met more than a dozen of my imaginary friends in person for the first time. It has been a little overwhelming, but in a good way. I find that most people’s communication styles online are quite close to their affect face-to-face.

Cindi takes great photos. I don’t, but I post ‘em anyway.

I went to talks today by Mary Ellen Bates, Jeff Wisniewski, Tom Ipri, and Roy Tennant. All were excellent speakers with very well-done presentations. I don’t know if I’ll take time later to type up my notes, but if you can find their slides on the CIL site or in the wild, they would be worth your while.

The talk I gave with Josh Neff and Rikhei Harris on the Library Society of the World was total chaos. Which is to say, it went rather well. There were about 150 people in the physical room with us and 20+ people in the LSW Meebo room.

I was worried that the whole thing might seem like an inside joke, or “look at us, aren’t we cool?” And maybe it did a little bit (OK, maybe a lot). But I think people got our main ideas about the creation of online community, the benefit of online spaces that blend the personal and professional, and our joy in making these connections. It must have resonated with a few people, as there are more names on the wiki, and more “guests” and new members in the Meebo room today.

We left the LSW room chat window up on the screen for the whole presentation. I knew that it would be distracting, but that was part of the fun (especially when we got rickrolled, and you could hear “Never Gonna Give You Up” start up on people’s laptops throughout the room).

I couldn’t see much of what scrolled by on the screen, but it drew laughter and confused stares.

We didn’t have slides. If we did, they might look like this, or even these. But probably not.

A few blogs have posted on our session. Here is what I have seen so far:

At the very least, we did something a bit different, a bit anarchic. Greg Schwartz (who is selling T-shirts these days, I hear) said there was an interesting contrast between our half of the session, and the group we shared our timeslot with, the Infododads bloggers. Greg pointed out, that unlike us the Infodoodads folks had “structure and content.”

At this point, I’ll take that as a compliment.