So I went to bloggercon today. I went to the Librarianesque panel and the one on blogging in Academia. I’d never been to a conference before where the main action came from the audience as opposed to a speaker giving a presentation.

Some things the librarianesque session talked about that I’d liked to have seen further developed -

How would you go about developing an index for a blog? Self-determined categories are often unspecific. Lis Riba had already explored this some and said the closest print equivelent to indexing a blog would be a newspaper, which makes sense to me.

Issues centering around using a blog to promote the virtual space of a library as opposed to the idea of a library as a physical space. I don’t see the problem with this so much, I think that libraries aren’t competing with themselves in terms of the physical library vs the virtual library as much as they might be competing with the idea that “everything’s on the web”. If a user decides to only take advantage of the online aspects of a library that is fine with me. Many people pointed out that you could use a blog to promote events and happenings in the physical library.

One thing that interested me (I’d never get to do this since we don’t do book clubs where I work) is the idea of using a community blog to facilitate book clubs — another way to either host a virtual discussion on a book, or promote the clubs in your library.

I don’t know who the guy was who asked if the librarians thought they’d eventually be replaced by intelligent agents, but the response to that question was emphatic and swift