First Official CiL Blog Entry Thingie: ResearchBuzz at CiL 2006

Good morning out there. I'm writing from the lovely Hilton Washington, home of the Computers In Libraries 2006 conference. We're going to get a little snow later, but at the moment it's awesome.. plenty of early morning sunshine.

Actually the conference does not start until tomorrow; I'm here to co-host a workshop with Gary Price, "Current Events Awareness". This is normally something that he and Genie Tyburski do, but unfortunately she can't make it this year. I had dinner last night with Gary at Potbelly's, and I promise you he has a lot to say.

I was reading over the final conference program and I must admit to some jealousy. I have been a huge advocate of RSS for over six years at this point (I had my epiphany, thanks to Blake Carver, in January 2000.) Yet at conferences like this I am still asked to get into step-by-step explanations of what RSS is and why people should care. I don't mind doing this. However what is all over the program this year? WIKIS!

Wiki sessions, Wiki sessions everywhere! Are Wikis worthy of coverage? Of course they are, they're valuable tools, and if the unofficial CIL Wiki is any indiciation, librarians know it. I'm just a little jealous that Wikis do not appear to be subject to the same learning curve as RSS. I was trying to figure out why. Perhaps it's because there's an easy hook of understanding to hang Wikis on -- collaboration tools. Perhaps a one-sentence explanation ("Wikis are like Web sites that anybody can edit") is way, way too simple, but it's something you can wrap your head around. Maybe it's because it's easy to just bust out a Wiki and start messing around, while with RSS feeds there still a few more steps involved.

Whatever it is, I wish RSS had a little more of it.

More later.

Posted to Internet-Technology