So it's time to start thinking about March madness. No, not college basketball, but conference season. Unfortunately, two important conferences have been scheduled at the same time this year: PLA and Computers in Libraries. I can't imagine that this cross-scheduling will not negatively impact both conferences. I've already talked to one vendor who is putting all its eggs in one conference's basket and skipping the other entirely. And the choice is surprising. In addition, many of the people that I look forward to running into at CiL are spending most of the week at PLA (and this includes a number of non-public librarians).

So I am bit disheartened by the conflict, although extremely excited about heading to D.C. in a few weeks. With thanks to Meredith Farkas and her foresight in starting the unofficial CiL2006 wiki, I see that I will get to meet a number of folks who I've only known virtually: Dave Hook, Nicole Engard, Chad Boeninger, Tom Peters, Lori Bell, Alane Wilson, Paul Miller and, of course, Meredith.

[This would be a nice opening for my shameless plug of pbwiki, an excellent free web-based wiki service, which is playing host to the CiL2006 wiki. I must disclaim that this positive commentary will result in extra upload space for me, but I love them nonetheless. Check out the Carnival wiki or my Podcasting101 presentation to see pbwiki in action.]

I will be speaking twice at CiL this year. On Wednesday, I'll be sharing the stage with Christina Pikas as we discuss "Searching the New Digital Formats." Christina will be covering blog search (a topic I discussed at Internet Librarian 2004), while I will be discussing the finer points of podcast search. I'll also be doing a quick podcasting cybertour on Thursday, which will be similar (yet different) to the prerecorded cybertour that I contributed to Internet Librarian 2005. I'd like to think that I've earned the right to display the following:

Can't wait to see you all in D.C.

Update: Have to add Dorothea Salo and Amanda Etches-Johnson to the list of people I look forward to finally meeting in D.C.