The Biblio File

For this exercise, we had to browse through SEOmoz’s Web 2.0 awards winners and find something we liked. One of the apps that I liked was Confab. It is a service that lets you keep track of the conferences you are attending or interested in, and link up with other people who are attending that conference. You can register for a free account and create profile that you can make as detailed as you want. Then you can browse through conferences by category. I looked through the library conferences, which is a subcategory of education. There is a search box, but I searched for both American Library Association and ALA, and got no results each time. But, I was able to find the listing for ALA Annual by browsing for it.

Once you find a conference you are interested in, you can denote whether you are attending it, speaking at it, or just watching it. You can add sessions and speakers, and see who else has linked to the conference. There are links to the conference websites, as well as links to mapping featueres like Mapquest and Google Maps.

Over all, it seems like a handy way to keep track of conference info. Right now, usership seems a little sparse (there were only 2 other people listed as attending ALA this June) and it would be nice if there was some way that the sessions could be automatically populated rather than mannually entered. Since all the information is stored online and computer access can sometimes be hard to get at conferences, it would also be great if you could get SMS alerts with news or reminders about upcoming sessions. But perhaps as more people start using, these will be features added in further iterations.