Disruptive Library Technology Jester

Following in the footsteps of last year’s annual conference and the midwinter meeting earlier this year, there is now a conference tracking page on the HitchHikr service for the 2007 Annual Conference in Washington DC. The URL for the tracker is:

http://hitchhikr.com/index.php?conf_id=212

From this one page, you’ll be able to discover blog postings and Flickr pictures related to the meeting. If you have a blog of your own, be sure to add the ‘ala2007′ tag to your postings so they will be picked up by HitchHikr. (If your blog software doesn’t offer tagging capabilities, just put this piece of HTML code — <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/ala2007" rel="tag">ala2007</a> — anywhere in the body of your blog posting.) If you post pictures to Flickr, assign the tag ‘ala2007′ and HitchHikr will find them. Share this information with bloggers and Flickr users to maximize the usefulness of our HitchHikr page!

About HitchHikr

Created by David Warlick in June 2006, HitchHiker is a response to what he saw as an explosion of useful conferences and meetings — more than one could possibly attend. HitchHikr promotes “a virtual space where, thanks to blogs, podcasts, and RSS, we can connect, share, respond, and grow knowledge out beyond the place and time of the event.” Warlick describes the service this way:

It’s a conference aggregator for lack of a better phrase. You’ll see two lists of conferences in the panel to the right. The top list includes conferences that will be happening in the next month (in red), conferences that have already happened in the last month (gray), and any conferences that are currently going on (blue). The longer list beneath includes all of the conferences that have been registered on hitchhikr. They are sorted by popularity.

You can click any conference to receive its report. Reports include a brief description, submitted by the person who registered the event (any registered hitchhikr can add a conference), a logo, a link to the conference web site, dates and suggested tags. …

Beneath this area is the aggregator. There is a primary default tag that it searches on initially, displaying thumbnails of any tagged flickr images and a list of the latest blog articles. There’s also a link to an RSS feed that you can subscribe to in your favorite aggregator. Other suggested tags are listed, and will be search when you click them.