Too many conferences, not enough strength
If I went to every conference about which someone said to me, “Hey, are you going to that conference?” I’d rack up platinum frequent-flyer miles in a month.
Don’t ask me that question, please. If I haven’t announced the conference here, I’m not going to it. For the next several months, I’m going to DASER and I’m going to JCDL and that’s it.
Did I go to Internet Librarian? No, because I don’t really belong there. The stuff I do tends to be on the web but not of it. If someday in the misty future I end up a webby librarian (which I could; in the course of MPOW’s search for one, I learned that I really do have mad phat webby-librarian skillz), things’ll be different.
Am I going to ALA? No, because megaconferences honestly don’t thrill me. The talks tend to be watered-down and over-general, the crowding is wearisome, and (unlike some) I don’t want to treat a conference as a vacation, so exotic locales don’t entice me. The only upside to megaconferences is seeing people I don’t otherwise get to see, like the folks from Ruritania. While that’s nice, it doesn’t make up for the disadvantages.
(Speaking of Ruritania, I got an email from them congratulating me on my new job. They’re a class act, and you won’t ever hear me say different.)
Will I ever go back to Extreme Markup? Well… *sigh*… probably not any time soon. Markup Tech/XML ’99 changed my life. Extreme 2004 was fun. Truth is, though, I’m not a markup geek any more… and the real truth is, I never was a markup-theory geek. I just pushed bits around until they became markup. Honestly, that’s all I ever did. There’s nothing wrong with that (somebody’s gotta do it!), but at Extreme I’m an interloper. I don’t have anything to contribute, and what gets discussed is mostly at such a high level that I don’t really take a whole lot home, either.
It’s a great conference. It’s just not a great conference for me.
I don’t get invitations to keynote. Doubt I ever will; I’m not pretty and what I do is important rather than attention-grabbing. (Don’t get me wrong—wouldn’t have it any other way. I did attention-grabbing but futile back in the ebook days, and a taste of that was quite quite enough.)
I’ve been known to get some of my expenses paid by way of offering tutorials, but it’ll be a while before I’m solid enough in my new career to pick up those gigs again. While the conference support I get from work is decent enough, it’s not generous by any stretch of the imagination; it’s lucky my folks live near JCDL, because a lot of that’s coming right out of my own pocket.
I have to ration my time, my strength, my money, and my travel-tolerance. I can’t go to conferences just to glad-hand; I have to get something out of them. So if I haven’t said I’m going—I’m not.