The handout from my preconference session with Steven Cohen about Blogging and RSS is now available online as a PDF file. Today's presentation should go up on Friday. I don't have a copy of my "Dead and Emerging Technologies" presentation because for once I didn't use Powerpoint, but tomorrow I'm covering Steven's "Using Blogs to Market Yourself" Cybertour, which will be pretty much the same as the one I did at Internet Librarian last fall.

You have no idea how difficult it has been to be blogless during a tech conference! Thanks to Lawrence Lee for figuring out what was wrong!

One of the things I've been dying to blog about is how different my conference experience has been thanks to the Treo 600. There's the obvious stuff, like the reduction in clutter. BT (Before Treo), I would pack my cell phone, PDA, Audible Otis player, and MP3 player, plus a separate cord for each one. Oh, and headphones, too. This is my first business trip with the Treo, and I kept feeling like I was forgetting something because I only packed one device, one cord, and one set of headphones.

Even better, though, has been the boost in functionality. Moblogging has been a lot of fun, and I've been sending some of the pictures of D.C. to the kids. When walking around town, I listened to Shoutcast music. I played games riding the Metro (yeah, I could have done that with my previous PDA, but it only had 8MB of memory and I normally wouldn't have carried it with me). I also downloaded a free Metro app that gave me train directions for getting around D.C.

On the work side, I took notes on the Treo at a couple of the conference sessions because I didn't feel like booting up my laptop. I've kept up with my email in real time (especially my work email), and was able to respond to the more urgent messages right away. I was able to quietly keep in touch with Aaron, Steven, and Michael via SMS, as well as instant messaging with others back home. Today, I finally got fed up with the lack of internet connectivity (wired or wireless) in the meeting rooms so I downloaded PDAnet and hopped online during the sessions (too bad I couldn't blog!!).

I can't stress enough how much more efficient I've been because of this one device. I've had several people come up to ask me about it (and not just at the conference, but when I was sightseeing, too), and I think I've talked Michael Sauers into getting one, so I feel that my job here is complete and I can indeed return home tomorrow. ;-)

BTW, Michael is one of the few people (if not the only person) blogging the conference. Greg Schwartz, Michael Stephens, and I have all had software problems and haven't been able to post anything. On the plus side, there has been a lot of talk about blogs and particularly RSS, which I take as a good sign. So far this is one of the better conferences I've been to in a while, and I've been meeting some really great people. If you haven't been to CIL, I encourage you to attend next year!