Live From the Internet Librarian Conference in Monterey, CA

Web 2.0 tools and practices, web services, social media such as Facebook and Twitter, and new platforms of social computing are among the subjects at the Internet Librarians' Conference that began Monday.

Leading information professionals gathered in Monterey to hear a rousing key note from Howard Rheingold on Monday morning. Rheingold, author of "Smart Mobs" discussed education and the emergence of social computing in the library, and touched on the rise of networks for academe and education, groups, boomers, business, and researchers.

Among the workshops were "Cool Tools For Library Webmasters," "Facebook and Libraries," "Podcasting and Video Tutorials," and "Twitter: Keep Up With the Twits."

If there is one thing that stands out here, it's the domination of Twitter among librarians. It has become the central way for people to give or receive updates and I overheard that The University of Texas at San Antonio is using Twitter to relay information to students.

The major idea at the Web Design seminar was to keep simplicity at the forefront of any site. David Lee King of davidleeking.com said "Experience is economic," and emphasized that there were 3 goals to achieve with your design: your users' (customers'), your company's (library's) and the community's at large.

King emphasized the importance of community participation. "This is the point of the web," he said, pointing to Facebook's successful use of applications to engage groups, not just individuals.

King emphasized the idea that your goals as a webmaster are as critical as your users, and hammered the point home that engaging content will always bring an audience. He encouraged all bloggers to regularly update your site and not to concentrate on matters of SEO until you a small audience has clustered.

At the Search Widgets conference, Jason Clark of Montana State University's research team showed live applications that provide different search functionality for for library materials such as Google Gadget and flash amimated subject maps.

At the Facebook talk, David Bietila of George Washington University spoke on the stigma of social networking sites. "Many users perceive Facebook as primarily a social space," he said. The presence of professors or parents can be unwelcome, intrusive or just plain "weird." GW's Gelman Library worked with anthropoligists to to study the patterns of behavior of students on Facebook.

Among the digital games being hawked were a new version of Solitaire that that is now ubiquitous in European libraries and the Dark Ink game from the Netherlands.

A Second Life lecture by LibGig writer Rhonda Trueman was a cybertour of resources and other facilities located on Info Island on Second Life. Info Island was the first land mass purchased for libraries, librarians and library patrons. Since its founding, a growing number of allied islands have joined what is now the Information Archipelago.

A Twitter Tips and Tricks seminar by Michael Sauers and Christa Burns of the Nebraska Library Commission taught attendees how to tweet and get the most out of microblogs from your coterie. "Twitter is hard to explain," said Sauers. "It's experiential. You need to do twitter to get twitter."

User-focused tools were the subject of the closing key note by Elizabeth Lawley, Director of the Rochester Institute of Technology. She said social and mobile technologies were the primary way to connect and integrate our activities and resources into our clients' and communities' workflows and lives.