I gave a little talk about social software for library people at the Pikes Peak Library District‘s staff day today. It was similar to the talk of the same name I gave a few years back to the Jefferson County Public Library staff day. The goal is not for me to tell a public library how to use social software. First I don’t really know what a public library should do, and second, PPLD already has blogs, Twitter, etc. On the level of the institution, they have this stuff going on.

My intention is more to talk about how I see the web now, especially the part that we still call the “social web” or “read/write web” or whatever. (One of my points is that this is really all just “the web,” as people don’t log into Facebook and say “I’m gonna get my web 2.0 on!”) I try and show that even for things that look trivial from outside, there is real communication happening between real people and real communities forming that transcend websites and screennames.

I did the same talk twice in a row this morning, which was great, because it meant that it wasn’t the same talk. In the first session, I was too concerned about getting through what I’d planned to talk about. I think people enjoyed the talk–they were polite enough to say so, anyway–but after me gabbing for 45-50 minutes, no one was really interested in questions or discussion. I’d talked them into submission.

For the second group, I didn’t wait until the end for questions. I picked a spot right after talking about this idea that social networks look different from the inside than they do from outside. At that point, I stopped and asked for comments and reactions, or for people to share their stories about their own use of online social networks.

By stopping in the middle, I think I left them enough room to enter the conversation, and not feel that I had already said everything that needed to be said. People talked about how they found long-ago neighbors on Facebook; about the perils of the library trying out every new thing; and about wikis and authority and etiquitte. It was great. I had to thow out my last dozen slides or something, but who cares?

I kinda kicked myself a little bit, because this seems to be a lesson I have to keep learning. Just as with an unconference, it’s the people actually in the room that count, not what I thought would make for a good talk the night or the week or the year before. Just as with my instuction sessions for students, it’s probably best to go in with a few outcomes in mind and leave the details to work themselves out. Just like online social networks themselves, presentations can be about sharing and conversation and community instead of just an information dump.