I’m feeling pretty energized these days. Fabulous wife, two awesome kids, house that I can call home. My job has settled in to become something I enjoy (most days). The show is everything I hoped it would be (although I could do a better job of marketing it). And my network of librarianly friends and acquaintances seems to grow on an almost daily basis. Things are firing on all cylinders.

It’s the perfect time for a conference.* After a bit of a hiatus, I’m returning to the ITI conference scene for Computers in Libraries 2008. And I’m pumped up about it.

I’ll be speaking twice. First, with the estimable Matt Gullett, I’ll be talking about Libraries as Laboratories for Innovation and, more specifically, about the efforts of our innovation team at my workplace.

The second presentation is a bit more unconventional, at least by library conference standards. It’s called a Pecha Kucha. The idea is that each presenter is allowed 20 slides that are displayed for 20 seconds each. 6:40 to get up, get on with it and get off. Beautiful. That’s about the limit of my attention span.

In this particular Pecha Kucha 2.0, as it’s billed, each participant will be evangelizing for a particular 2.0 technology (naturally, I’ll be covering podcasting) with a final presenter taking on the role of naysayer. Should be good fun and the fellow participants are all noteworthy presenters.

But as many of you know, the real joy of a conference comes from the other attendees, and in particular, the conversations you have in between sessions, at receptions, over meals, and so on. This year, I expect to be fully overwhelmed.

Beyond the old friends with whom I’m anxious to reconnect, there’s a whole new web of acquaintances that I’ve made through the show and through the wacky world of social networking, especially Twitter and Facebook. I can’t wait to meet as many of them as I can in person. I’m all about bringing people together right now. In many ways, that’s what Uncontrolled Vocabulary is all about.

Anyway, all of this yammering on is for no greater purpose than to share some of my excitement with you. I feel we could all use a little more good energy around this little chunk of the blogosphere. So here, have some of mine.

* I know that this is a bit early to discuss a conference in April, but I can’t help myself. I’m excited now!

Looks like we’re in business. All feeds have been redirected accordingly, so you RSS fans shouldn’t need to do anything. For the record, the proper feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/openstacks.

It’s amazing how properly redirecting my feeds has increased what Feedburner believes to be my subscriber count from 600+ to 1,000+. That’s largely due to the number of folks who are still subscribed to my RSS 1.0 index.rdf feed, which was never dealt with in the move to Feedburner (unlike its RSS 2.0 counterpart, index.xml) .

It also stands to reason that a certain percentage of readers are subscribed twice, for example in Bloglines and then again in Google Reader. There are probably 150+ feeds that get double subscriber counts from my Bloglines and Google Reader accounts. Perhaps a third, if my Rojo account is still active.

That said, I can’t ignore the fact that a lot of you are still here. It’s an incredible thing and I thank you for it.

This might actually work. One more test for the feeds. OK, we’re not quite working yet, but awfully close.

I had a fairly outdated installation of Movable Type using an antiquated database (Berkeley) with which I ran this site. Rather than try to figure out why the upgrade wasn’t working and then looking at migrating the databases, I decided to move to Wordpress. So far, so good, but I not sure about the feeds yet. Thus this test post, which you can disregard, except to note that the official RSS feed for Open Stacks is http://feeds.feedburner.com/openstacks. I won’t even begin to muck around with this theme (called Aspire) until I’m sure I’ve gotten the feeds redirecting accordingly.

Howdy everyone. I’m stunned by how many people still subscribe to this feed. I guess RSS makes that fairly painless. In fact, it’s probably less annoying to stay subscribed to people with no content than people who send out empty, content-deficient updates every once in a while, eh?

And so let this not be content-deficient. As I think most of you know, I’ve been running a weekly live interactive internet audio program called Uncontrolled Vocabulary. Every Wednesday night at 10 PM Eastern time, an ever-changing group of librarians, info pros and the occasional outlier get together using TalkShoe to chat about news and hot topics of the week in libraryland. Anyone is invited to participate in the live conversation. I’ll come back to how in a bit.

So far, we’ve done 29 episodes. Typically, somewhere between 5-10 people are on the call from a pool of 30+ people who’ve participated at one time or another. It’s usually a lively conversation that meanders through a variety of topics in an hour’s time.

In Episode 29, recorded two days ago, we talked about Amazon’s purchase of Audible, the DRM protest at Boston Public Library, the Microsoft-Yahoo!-AOL-News Corp activity, and the intersection of personal ethics and professional research. And that’s only half of it.

It’s really, really good stuff and I encourage you to check it out, if you haven’t already (or haven’t since the early days). Better yet, I encourage you to join in the fun. Over time, TalkShoe has made this easier and easier to do. Here’s how:

1. Dial 1-724-444-7444

2. Enter the show ID: 38665

3. Dial 1#

Dialing 1# will bring you into the call as a guest. If you want a username of your own, you can go to TalkShoe and sign up for an account. You’ll create a 10-digit PIN that you would use in place of 1# to come into the call under your username.

There’s also a chat interface that lets you listen live without calling in, as well as see who else is on the call (which is where the guest/username thing comes into play). TalkShoe has released a web version of this interface, so that a download is no longer necessary. Just go to our TalkShoe page at show time (anytime after 9:45 PM) and the link to jump into the chat will be available.

Of course, not everyone is available to participate in the live conversation, so recorded episodes are available for download. Our show page at TalkShoe has the most convenient list of mp3 links for download, but you’ll need to visit the blog for the accompanying show notes.

And of course, you can subscribe to the show’s Feedburner feed. It will work as both a blog feed (mostly show notes and reminders of upcoming shows) and as a podcast feed (for the mp3s, of course).

Those of you who don’t do the RSS thing can also subscribe and get blog updates sent via email. You’ll need to visit the sidebar of the show blog to find the email subscription service.

OK, enough already. If you haven’t checked out the show yet, I implore you to do so. It’s a consistent highlight of my week. If you have any questions about the show, drop me a line. And seriously, all are welcome to join in the fun.