Aside from my truly epic travel woes, all of which are pretty well documented on my Twitter stream, Internet Librarian 2009 was a great, great conference. I spoke twice, once as a part of a phenomenal mobile panel, and gave a cybertour on the Realtime Web. But it was all of the people and things that I was tangentially a part of that made the trip so exciting. Having an essay up as a part of the Library 101 project was exciting, and being able to be a part of the launching of that project in person was a bunch of laughs.
In addition, I was bowled over by some of the thoughtful comments I received at IL2009. To have people that I respect and adore tell me that they think I’m doing good things, well, nothing could be better. I had multiple people tell me that they hadn’t seen me present before, but that they were impressed with what I did…seriously, I’m all choked up just typing this. Combine that with the massive outpouring of help that manifested when I began having travel troubles, and I don’t think that anyone, anywhere, has a better group of friends. From me, to everyone at Internet Librarian 2009: Thank You!
And finally, because I’m a sucker for visualization, here’s a word cloud of the tweets from IL2009. Thanks to someone (who did this?) there’s an archive of all the tweets tagged #il2009, available not only for display on the web but as delimited text files! I grabbed the tab-delimited version, ground it up with TextEdit and removed the hashtag, along with dates, etc, and fed it to Wordle to see what the result looked like. Here it is….a pretty great representation of what people were talking about at IL2009.
