I am tired. My luck with airplanes is terrible. My flights to and from Chicago were delayed significantly. I arrived in Cleveland at 11:30 last night and had to scrape off the 1/2 inch of ice completely encasing my entire car. Forty five minutes of scraping and one broken (now) ice scraper later I was able to go home and sleep.

I enjoyed doing the webcast. It was great to see Bart and Dale again and it was nice to finally meet fellow blogger David. We had lots of interesting discussions about all sorts of things.

I will let you in on a little secret about the webcast... we do a lot of rehearsals. So by the time we are live, it is about 5th run through for us. After a while I began to wonder whether I said everything or if what I remembered saying was actually said in one of the previous rehearsal sessions.

So here are some post webcast thoughts that I want to address.

Micro-blogging - I am so glad somebody asked the question, "What is micro-blogging?" According to Wikipedia, is a "form of blogging that allows users to write brief text updates (usually less than 200 characters) and publish them, either to be viewed by anyone or by a restricted group which can be chosen by the user. These messages can be submitted by a variety of means, including text messaging, instant messaging, email, MP3 or the web." Twitter is a popular micro-blogging application.
Until very recently I have not seen how it might be useful in medical libraries or research groups. Then I discovered Pownce which integrates micro-blogging with file-sharing, URL sharing, and event invitations. I kind of think of Pownce as micro-blogging on steroids. However, it has its issues with a lot of browsers. Pownce has problems with IE6, IE7, and Opera. It really only works well on Firefox. I use IE7 at work and found that I can post text and URLs in Pownce but I cannot file share. I think the best feature of Pownce as a micro-blogger is its ability to share files among groups, so if you either have to use Firefox or they have to get their act together and fix its issues with IE.
If you can share files...Pownce offers groups of people the ability to share documents and files while carrying on conversations with a group or making and posting notes about the files. I have used wikis and Google docs to do a lot of group work on documents and I find that we usually end up making notes about our work and our rational for the changes we make within the actual document. What is nice about Pownce is that the notes are not within the document, they are posted on your Pownce page.
Will Pownce or other super micro-blogging applications be helpful in libraries or your daily life? Who knows. It was just released to the public in January 2008, so it is still early to know for sure. But I do see how it could be helpful.

The Wiki of Acq -This is a very new article that was just published in January 2008. I had a little trouble getting my hands on it initially so I am not sure if I listed it in the packet as supplemental material. For those of you interested in reading more about what Stanford Libraries did to move their Acquisition Department's Website and information to a wiki, the complete citation is:
"The Wiki of Acq: should you move your procedures to a Wiki?" Arch, Xan. Against the Grain. v. 19 (6) December 2007-January 2008. p. 78.
One interesting note is that it was the IT manager Deni Wicklund who suggested moving the acquisitions procedures and documentation information to wiki program.

Kittens - What started out as a rehearsal joke actually became a great way to describe how many of these applications are free to adopt, but just like adopting a kitten there are costs with the maintenance and upkeep. You must feed these applications to keep them going and to prevent them from being one of the many library related blog/wiki corpses strewn through out the Internet. The costs may just be something as simple as 5-10 minutes a day, or depending on their nature they might be a little more time consuming and some day they might need an investment of money (personnel or products). Think back 10 years ago when people, companies, and libraries had to have a web page, there were many personal as well as library home page corpses littering the Internet.

Questions - We tried very hard to get to all of the questions. At the end of the broadcast we were amazed by the pretty sizable stack of questions answered. However, I know we were unable to answer every question. So, David Rothman agreed to look at and answer some of the questions we ran out of time for. However, if you didn't have time to ask a question or after mulling over the webcast you now have a question, please feel to ask. Leave a comment on either David or my blogs.