thoughts on the first 24 hours at CiL

okay. I have clocked in my first 24 hours at CiL. I was ready to fall over after the presentations ended at five, had a glass a wine that went straight to my head, listened to a little George Michael in my room, then a yummy sushi dinner.

So, my initial thoughts:
Great to meet some of the people I know through blogs and twitter, especially figuring out who people are based on their tiny twitter avatar. I’ve meet very friendly, smart and generous people. Which has put to ease my middle schooler in the cafeteria fear, that I wouldn’t find people to have meals with. So silly. Just strike up a conversation, say hello, ask what people are enjoying, learning. It seems that some great friendships and collaborations are emerged from the web (Hello LSW!) and to the real world.

Apparently, green is the color for spring. The detail on the conference bags is green and there were lots of green shirts today. Maybe I’ll wear green tights tomorrow.

Utterly exhausting. All day, absorbing information. Typing my notes. Getting used to the fact that some people have more experience and skills presenting than others, some presentations didn’t quite match my expectations or even real world need. But trying to get as much out of it.

Wireless, totally annoying. So I pay ten bucks for a 24 hour period to connect, but I can’t connect to the T-Mobile network when I am in the conference rooms. But, there are some wireless networks that kept going in and out during the day. Seriously—with all the talk about how connected we are, community web 2.0 lalalala… will someone figure out how to add $20 bucks on to our registration charges and provide wireless to us free of charge? Please? We are already paying enough for $9 sandwiches and $15 nachos.

Though, LOVE the extension cords in the conference rooms. I had to charge my cell phone at one point and came in very handy. Thank you!

But the good:

The local 2.0 talk was great—some good ideas about things I had already been thinking about in my head. A colleague of mine is here as well, and we talked about doing some of these things once we returned. In my Basic Internet classes, I introduce Yahoo Local. People want to know what is happening in their community. A good talk, lots of concrete ideas.

Lee Rainie’s talk this morning was pretty interesting. He stressed the importance of user-generated content and threw some interesting statistics at us. He did tell us that the surveys the Pew conducts are in English. Hmm. I really want them to survey people in other languages especially Spanish, especially when he is talking about a large user group of libraries being Latino. Just drawing on my own library experience and the community we serve, there has got to be good data in there. And, it is just time.

Megan Fox’s presentation on Mobile Trends was a fast paced overview of the latest devices and technology out there on mobile devices. .mobi is a new domain that is just for pages formatted for mobile devices. Obviously the iphone and the ipod touch have taken over this field, but there are lots of cool tools out there. It is pretty obvious by looking at the hands of the librarians attending this conference.

More tomorrow!