Some­times we tell peo­ple that things live for­ever on the inter­net and that any­one can find them (so don’t post that pic­ture of your­self drink­ing alco­hol, young man), but I want to high­light how some impor­tant things from just a cou­ple of months ago are becom­ing impos­si­ble to find. If we’re not care­ful, the haystack is going to dis­ap­pear, never mind the needle.

For exam­ple, take the dis­cus­sion that hap­pened on Twit­ter dur­ing ALA’s Mid­win­ter Meet­ing just under two months ago. The Meet­ing had a hash­tag for track­ing con­tent (#alamw09), and almost every­one used it most of the time. There was a lot going on in that tag, so much so that I thought it was a tip­ping point for the Asso­ci­a­tion in terms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. I even debriefed what hap­pened on Twit­ter for ALA staff after­wards so that they’d be able to see the patterns.

But try to find that dis­cus­sion now, and it’s almost impos­si­ble. Most peo­ple (includ­ing me) rely on Twitter’s search engine (which was for­merly called “Sum­mize” and run by a dif­fer­ent com­pany until Twit­ter bought it). If you search Twit­ter now for the #alamw09 hash­tag, you get exactly one page of results (yes­ter­day there were two), and only a cou­ple of those tweets were actu­ally posted dur­ing the event itself. If you look up #alamw09 at hashtags.org, you’ll get more results from the Meet­ing itself, but there’s still only one page, and you had to have man­u­ally fol­lowed the hashtags.org Twit­ter account for them to have tracked your tweets, so even if you could see older results than what shows, it would be an incom­plete archive at best. Search Tech­no­rati for #alamw09 and you get eight blog posts. Iron­i­cally, you can get most of the pub­lic tweets from Mid­win­ter by search­ing Friend­Feedlooking for anything from #ala2008 on Twitter, although there again FriendFeed saves the day, but for how long?

So for all of our aggregation attempts of that Twitter content, they may only work in the moment for the moment. It turns out they're mis­cel­la­neous *and* search­able in only one place (for now), a pretty bad com­bi­na­tion in hind­sight. Thank heav­ens I favor­ited in Twit­ter so many of the alamw09 tweets, although that’s still not ideal. I have to man­u­ally page through them to find the ones I want, and I already have 35 pages of favorites.

After Mid­win­ter, I tried to start mov­ing my #alamw09 favorites into Ever­note so that I’d be able to search and group them, but I haven’t had time to com­plete that process, and I just can’t seem to train myself to add new tweets there as I favorite them. The ratio of effort between click­ing on a star and fill­ing out a few words of meta­data is just too much in the mid­dle of my day, so this looms as a project in my future if I really want to save this stuff. Even then, there’s no guar­an­tee Ever­note will stick around, but at least I can export from it.

So if you were using a hash­tag to aggre­gate con­tent, think­ing it would be eas­ier to find it all again in the future, think again. You’re going to have to do some­thing more proac­tive and man­ual than rely­ing on Twitter’s search engine or Google. You’ll have to decide what level of ephemer­a­li­ness you’re com­fort­able with for that con­ver­sa­tion, because you may not be able to get back to it if you let some­one else man­age access to the archive. In this con­text, it’s a shame so much of the con­ver­sa­tion has moved away from blog com­ments (where indi­vid­u­als can openly archive it) to Twit­ter and Friend­Feed. And if you’re a gov­ern­ment or archive orga­ni­za­tion look­ing to pre­serve this kind of dig­i­tal con­tent, the stakes are get­ting raised on you.

Am I miss­ing any other options for find­ing past hash­tag con­ver­sa­tions? Please tell me yes in the comments.

Adden­dum: Poten­tial ideas for archiv­ing — you could sub­scribe to the RSS feed of a hash­tag in an RSS reader and export them, right? Or sub­scribe to the RSS feed via email? Other ideas?

Today I was part of a panel ses­sion about Web 2.0 tools for the GMC/PCMA

Greg Fine — Asso­ci­a­tion Forum

showed some of their Asso­ci­a­tion Pro­fes­sion­als through­out His­tory video
showed the map of online com­mu­ni­ties from 2007 (“gulf of youtube”)
social media is about build­ing com­mu­nity, and Greg likes this visual because it shows there are actual places and you can’t just aim­lessly wan­der around
– it lets you lever­age exist­ing net­works
– it allows us to eas­ily cre­ate and share infor­ma­tion with one another (as asso­ci­a­tions, we’re about asso­ci­at­ing)
– allows this to hap­pen in an instan­ta­neous way
– on a plat­form that peo­ple are com­fort­able with
so if we as orga­ni­za­tions lever­age these plat­forms, we make it eas­ier for our mem­bers to find us and inter­act with us
– it allows you to evan­ge­lize your mem­bers and your customers

there are gen­er­a­tional dis­tinc­tions — gen­er­ally accepted dis­tinc­tions
uses accept­able footwear for men on day one of their new job as way to dis­tin­guish between them
great­est gen­er­a­tion — wingtips
Xers — black lace-up, but moved to the boat shoe
Millennials/GenY — ten­nis shoes
Gamers — flip-flops
can’t talk to a flip-flop from a wingtip per­spec­tive
even the ten­nis show crowd may not totally get the flip-flop one
also have the 80–20-1 rule
80% of peo­ple who are on the inter­net only look/lurk and don’t engage
20% of the 80% actively engage (read RSS, have a Face­book page)
1% of that 20% are active users of social media online (blog, post to Wikipedia, etc.)
EXCEPT for the gamers, where the num­bers are reversed
only 1% are not active online, etc.

the #1 rule is that the orga­ni­za­tion totally loses con­trol in this envi­ron­ment
if some­one wants to say some­thing bad about you, they don’t need your site/platform to do it
so embrace it
do you use free or pro­pri­etary and build your own?
Greg is a big believer in free
– free
– pro­pri­etary usu­ally means sep­a­rate authen­ti­ca­tion scheme and peo­ple have pass­word fatigue now
– do you have an open or closed sys­tem (can any­one be a mem­ber or is it a mem­ber benefit)

Asso­ci­a­tion Forum makes every­thing open because if you care enough to join, maybe you’ll even­tu­ally become a mem­ber
there’s no right or wrong, but you need to be delib­er­ate about what you’re going to do

set rea­son­able expec­ta­tions
men­tioned a case where a group thought they’d failed because they only had 1,200 peo­ple on their Face­book page
but they only had 10,000 mem­bers total!

you can­not think like you — you have to think like your audi­ence
just because you don’t use it doesn’t mean oth­ers shouldn’t
oth­ers may cre­ate these sites (like a Face­book page) for you if you don’t do it
you have to inte­grate it with tra­di­tional meth­ods
you don’t just do one thing in iso­la­tion — f2f, email newslet­ters, etc. are still valid
taken all together, it makes it all more valuable

it’s like a foot­ball expe­ri­ence — it’s the future of the asso­ci­a­tion expe­ri­ence
the audi­ence in the sta­dium are the mem­bers, who paid admis­sion
within that audi­ence are dif­fer­ent lev­els (box seats ver­sus bleach­ers)
over time, our expe­ri­ences inside the sta­dium may be more valu­able than just being a member

some tools:
– Face­book
– Forum Effect (blogging)

Flickr — an online pic­ture shar­ing site that lets you tag images
showed pic­tures tagged with ASAE
user-generated con­tent (pic­tures from atten­dees)
every­body has a cell phone these days, and these phones have cam­eras
35,000 pic­tures were posted from a con­fer­ence when they asked peo­ple to take a few and then they had a down­load station

YouTube — videos
when some­one comes in to present now, they do a “5 ques­tions with xxxx speaker” video
total time invest­ment per video is one hour, includ­ing the inter­view
they also allow the per­son to use the video, too

LinkedIn and Face­book
don’t upload your mem­ber list to a third-party site to require peo­ple who join are mem­bers, because this is a vio­la­tion of your mem­bers’ pri­vacy
let any­one become a mem­ber on your page
takes five min­utes to set this stuff up

strat­egy is impor­tant!
when you’re think­ing about all of this
Asso­ci­a­tion Forum uses these sites as guide­posts to help peo­ple get to the Forum website

Brad Lewis — Pro­fes­sional Con­ven­tion Man­age­ment Association

“lux­ury expen­di­tures” — travel
is in the media coun­ter­ing these neg­a­tive per­cep­tions and the dis­tinc­tions between legit­i­mate travel and these types of excesses

PCMA uses:
– Face­book
– Flickr
– LinkedIn
– blog on Type­Pad
– YouTube

goals for PCMA:
– want to be where their mem­bers are
– need to par­tic­i­pate in the cur­rent tech­nolo­gies
– facil­i­tate con­nec­tions
– cre­ate mem­ber engage­ment, reten­tion
– brand expe­ri­ence; how can your mem­bers inter­act with you?
– enhanced expo­sure for events, pro­grams, prod­ucts, and ser­vices
– cre­ate added value
– learn some­thing new every day

their most suc­cess­ful site is LinkedIn
rec­om­mend to their chap­ters that they cre­ate sites, too
you do lose some control

PCMA has 6,000 mem­bers and more than 1,000 have joined the LinkedIn group
PCMA posts new con­tent there and posts event news
no hard sells there
eases peo­ple into par­tic­i­pa­tion in the orga­ni­za­tion
present jobs, speaker info
most of the room was already on LinkedIn
from an asso­ci­a­tion stand­point, your mem­bers can already do a mul­ti­tude of things there (and on these other sites)
one sign-on
try to make your name the sign across plat­forms
want the full name and the acronym because you don’t know what peo­ple will search on

mon­i­tor­ing and con­trol:
– wild west; just need to accept that because you can’t pre­vent it
– PCMA does delete some stuff like direct sales solic­i­ta­tions
– does take a staff com­mit­ment, regard­less of which depart­ment is assigned to mon­i­tor
– think about how you’re fos­ter­ing and feed­ing the com­mu­nity, too; that’s why you want to choose which sites are best for you and your members

PCMA doesn’t mind when peo­ple say a ses­sion was hor­ri­ble, because it gives them feedback

take action:
– work with mar­ket­ing to cre­ate a group, work with mem­ber­ship to update it
– if you’re not mon­i­tor­ing what’s hap­pen­ing, your com­pe­ti­tion prob­a­bly is
– mon­i­tor for refer­ral requests (“who knows of a good xxxx com­pany?”), even if you don’t answer back
Brad encour­ages third party responses

what it’s for:
– net­work­ing with col­leagues
– get updates
– ask ques­tions
– gain insights
– share ideas

what it’s not for:
– solic­it­ing (it’s like using the wrong fork at din­ner)
– direct promotion

aver­age age of a PCMA mem­ber is 47
one of the young kids at a table didn’t know what LinkedIn was — “face­book for old people”

Face­book
– tar­get mar­ket seg­men­ta­tion
– stu­dents (announce schol­ar­ships, intern­ships, com­mu­ni­ca­tion with PCMA stu­dent staff)
– cre­ate event
– dis­cus­sion boards (stu­dents were vol­un­tar­ily mak­ing rec­om­men­da­tions to oth­ers about join­ing PCMA)

Flickr
– annual meet­ing (linked from com­mu­ni­ca­tions, pho­tos for dailies, mem­ber engage­ment even if they can’t attend)
– social net­work­ing cen­tered around pho­tos
– share pho­tos within groups and tags

Type­Pad blog
– new PCMA Chair­man John Folks’ blog
– puts face on lead­er­ship
– way for lead­er­ship to con­nect with mem­bers and get feed­back
– start con­ver­sa­tions among colleagues

YouTube
– PCMA has a YouTube chan­nel
– some lead­er­ship hasn’t wanted to be on YouTube
– only have a few select videos but it’s a good way to put a face on the orga­ni­za­tion and tell stories

pro­pri­etary sys­tems
– PCMA did pur­chase an expen­sive prod­uct for “PCMA Con­nect“
– can trial on free before you try pro­pri­etary
– had bells and whis­tles but was a sep­a­rate destination

Learn­ings
– con­ver­sa­tion hap­pens organ­i­cally
– hot top­ics are anonymity, reluc­tance to speak your mind, gen­eral best has been more social (New Year’s res­o­lu­tions)
be rel­e­vant to the peo­ple who con­nect with you

philoso­phies and con­clu­sions
– your mem­ber pro­file will deter­mine which plat­form works best for you
– lead­er­ship accep­tance, need some buy-in
– cer­tainly trial this stuff
these are just new assets in the arse­nal, and they’re even free
– impor­tant to engage in rel­e­vant busi­ness of today

Jenny Levine (me)

here are my slides (12MB, PDF)

I’ve really been feel­ing my Gen Xness the last few months. I dis­like fram­ing Web 2.0 or Library 2.0 as gen­er­a­tional issues (I think it has far more to do with whether you’re used to cre­at­ing and shar­ing con­tent over­all), but the rise of Twit­ter and Friend­Feed in par­tic­u­lar have made me feel like even more of a bridge because I get stretched thin try­ing to explain both sides of an issue to two groups who aren’t really talk­ing to each other about these things. Like Johnny Cash, I walk the line.

As a GenX bridge, one side of me under­stands the Boomer con­fu­sion at these pub­lic posts and won­ders why these folks can’t just call, email, or text a per­son who could actu­ally do some­thing about the prob­lem they’re encoun­ter­ing. Recently, I felt this most acutely when Jason Grif­fey took the time to write a blog post dis­agree­ing with two rules for sub­mit­ting ques­tions to ALA pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates on YouTube. I’m close enough to the tra­di­tional, Boomer norms of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that when I first read Jason’s post, my imme­di­ate reac­tion was to sigh and won­der why he couldn’t have just con­tacted some­one at MPOW to request that the rules be changed. The “direct” approach seems like the log­i­cal one for affect­ing change and hav­ing your voice heard.

And then the Mil­len­nial side of the bridge kicked in and I chided myself, because Jason actu­ally cared enough to take the time to write that post instead of just a 140-character rant. He explained his rea­son­ing in what has (sur­pris­ingly) become a long-form medium online (blog­ging). In hind­sight, his post helped change one of the rules he dis­agreed with, so it was bet­ter that he posted pub­licly where every­one could read it and com­ment, includ­ing us. And hon­estly, some of the com­ments on microblog­ging sites are com­plaints that some­one did try to call or email a human being and didn’t get a good response, so it’s not that these gen­er­a­tional pref­er­ences are exclu­sive. Writ­ing a blog post these days is a pretty high level of engage­ment, and car­ing enough to post a tweet or Friend­Feed com­ment is right behind that in terms of try­ing to get our atten­tion (hey, at least MPOW isn’t mediocre).

My per­sonal les­son from these recent expe­ri­ences is that it’s impor­tant for asso­ci­a­tions (and libraries) to under­stand that every blog post, every tweet, every FF com­ment is like a let­ter to the edi­tor or some­one stand­ing up in a mem­ber­ship meet­ing and voic­ing a com­plaint. They’re the 21st cen­tury equiv­a­lent of a phone call or a con­ver­sa­tion in the hall­way at a con­fer­ence, and we have to take them just as seri­ously and respond to them the same way we would those 20th cen­tury meth­ods of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. It’s not that Boomers want to help any less, but I think they’re used to help­ing peo­ple one-on-one, even online. For many mem­bers who likely trend younger, the new chan­nels are their pre­ferred ones for these types of com­ments, and not just for com­plaints. There isn’t any­thing wrong with either approach, but they’re ships cross­ing in the night, and they don’t lead to con­ver­sa­tions between the two sides that would improve communication.

Some­times I think attack­ing MPOW is a national sport, so it can be depress­ing being the per­son con­stantly relay­ing what’s being said about us online. But it’s impor­tant for those of us in the mid­dle to be that bridge and find com­pro­mises that work for every­one. So I espe­cially appre­ci­ate those folks who take the time to com­ment online in a con­struc­tive way (regard­less of the chan­nel), because it helps me build that bridge.

This strain isn’t new, but I’m curi­ous to know if other Gen Xers are feel­ing an increase in this area due to microblog­ging sites? Have you found suc­cess­ful strate­gies for improv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion around these new chan­nels? I have some ideas that I’m going to try to imple­ment at work, and I’ll report back here over time, but I’d love to hear how oth­ers are han­dling being at this intersection.

Last week I noted that of all of the social media sites, I’m prob­a­bly most engaged with Face­book right now. Twit­ter tends to frag­ment my atten­tion too much, so I started restrict­ing my time on it to about an hour a day. The con­ver­sa­tion there is too dis­jointed for me, and it’s impos­si­ble to find and refer back to all the pieces of a con­ver­sa­tion even just a few days later. The best I’ve been able to man­age is to use Tweet­Deck to cre­ate groups to check in on peri­od­i­cally, as opposed to try­ing to keep up with every­one all the time. I still don’t let myself sit on Twit­ter for too long because as Ed Viel­metti says, “If you keep refresh­ing it will never, ever stop..” In fact, my rule of thumb on any social site is that I never hit the “older” button.

Then Friend­Feed came along, which helped unify con­ver­sa­tions and brought pic­tures, audio, and video into the mix. The breadth of ser­vices it aggre­gates is pretty impres­sive, so when a crit­i­cal mass of friends hit there, I switched my hour a day to check in there.

Let me pref­ace this next state­ment by say­ing that I love the serendip­ity of Friend­Feed, and it def­i­nitely restores fun to aggre­ga­tion. That said, it moves way too fast for me. As a result, I’ve come to the con­clu­sion that Friend­Feed is Twit­ter on speed, while Face­book is Twit­ter on Ritalin, and for where I’m at right now, Face­book is my pri­mary drug of choice. I need some­thing to help me con­trol the fire­hose so that I can more eas­ily focus on spe­cific pieces, and the fact that I can sep­a­rate the links and posts from the sta­tus updates on FB does exactly that. I have the sta­tus of about three dozen folks texted to my phone, which means I see what I con­sider to be the most impor­tant func­tion of the site for me front and center.

I had been friend­ing peo­ple there for a while, watched what libraries were doing, and gone through the “play with var­i­ous appli­ca­tions” stage of Face­book love, but then I found myself using it less and less. I fell back in love with it, though, when they added the abil­ity to com­ment on a friend’s sta­tus, because that’s the piece I was hav­ing trou­ble track­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in amongst all of the con­ver­sa­tions tak­ing place on Twit­ter. Even bet­ter was a change in the way SMS responses are han­dled so that replies from my phone now appear as com­ments on sta­tuses, not inbox mes­sages attached to pre­vi­ous emails. That means there’s con­ver­sa­tion around updates, and it’s at a man­age­able pace.

I still check Friend­Feed a cou­ple of times a day, but I’m swamped with enough stuff right now that I use my social net­works first and fore­most for friend updates, and Face­book turns out to be per­fect for that, espe­cially for my non-library friends. I can lit­er­ally see oth­ers get­ting a lot out of Twit­ter and Friend­Feed because they mon­i­tor those sites a lot more closely, and more power to them. There are a lot of con­ver­sa­tions right now about the ROI of blog­ging ver­sus Twit­ter ver­sus Friend­Feed, but it’s impor­tant to exam­ine what you want to get from these tools in order to eval­u­ate which one(s) are best for you at any given time, remem­ber­ing that it’s all cycli­cal and is likely to change just when you get com­fort­able with your rou­tine. Of course, that can be a good thing.

As 2008 comes to a close (where on earth did it go?), I want to take a moment to reflect on this past year.

When I think about every­thing I was lucky enough to do this this year, what stands out the most are the peo­ple I met dur­ing my trav­els, both online and offline. The best thing about social net­work sites is the social part, and this year my net­work expanded to include new friends and redis­cov­ered old ones. In fact, that’s def­i­nitely been one of my high­lights for the year — recon­nect­ing with folks from my pre-online life, which to me is an indi­ca­tor that online net­works are def­i­nitely going main­stream. I’m see­ing so many more non-techie friends there, and I really appre­ci­ate being able to con­nect with them in this way. I still don’t have a lot of time to spend on Twit­ter or Friend­Feed, but I’ve gone back to Face­book more and more because that’s where I’m find­ing a lot of these folks. Plus, it runs at a speed that works well for me right now (some­thing I’m going to write more about it in an upcom­ing post).

This was espe­cially true this year when I had so many projects going on at work. I haven’t writ­ten about my job at ALA here very much, mainly because I’ve been too busy to blog much at all. How­ever, this was such a pro­duc­tive and pro­gres­sive year at my job that I want to high­light a few of the things we accom­plished. While this is by no means an exhaus­tive list (and it’s cer­tainly not reflec­tive of the work done across the orga­ni­za­tion as a whole), these are just a few of the things that were per­son­ally grat­i­fy­ing for me in 2008, because I played a role in help­ing them hap­pen. In chrono­log­i­cal order:

• Gam­ing in libraries
  The year started out big for us when we learned about the $1 mil­lion grant from the Ver­i­zon Foun­da­tion. It’s allowed us to move this topic for­ward very quickly, and soon we’ll start post­ing the tan­gi­ble out­comes. Watch for more to come from this grant in 2009, which will help build on our gen­eral suc­cesses around gam­ing so far. In 2008, we launched the Games and Gam­ing Mem­ber Ini­tia­tive Group, ran a big game at our Annual Con­fer­ence, started a new Games in Libraries pod­cast, held a sec­ond suc­cess­ful Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium, and coör­di­nated the first annual National Gam­ing Day @ your library. All in all, a very good year for gam­ing in libraries.
• In April, Library Tech­nol­ogy Reports pub­lished Gam­ing and Libraries: Broad­en­ing the Inter­sec­tions, my sec­ond issue ded­i­cated to the topic.
• AL Focus launched an incred­i­bly pop­u­lar series of videos for National Library Week. Full credit for these bril­liant pieces goes to Dan Kraus.
• In August, we launched the READ mini-poster gen­er­a­tor that does just what it sounds like it does. We’ve got­ten a great response to this, and you can see some of the results in the READ Flickr pool.
• In Octo­ber, Amer­i­can Libraries mag­a­zine cel­e­brated Open Access Day by open­ing its archives and mak­ing the cur­rent issue avail­able to every­one for free. In 2009, watch for HTML ver­sions of cur­rent issues (not just PDFs) and expanded con­tent. Con­grat­u­la­tions to Leonard Knif­fel and his crew for tak­ing such a big step!
• At the same time, the AL folks decided to open up their weekly email newslet­ter AL Direct and let any­one sub­scribe. I don’t have any­thing at all to do with the pro­duc­tion of it, so I don’t think it’s self-promoting to say that I think this is one of the most valu­able cur­rent aware­ness tools in the pro­fes­sion. Full credit for the con­tent and deliv­ery goes to George Eber­hart, and my involve­ment has been mainly to advo­cate that *every­one* should be able to ben­e­fit from his hard work. Now that can include you, even if you’re not an ALA member.
• Finally, ALA Con­nect just com­pleted alpha test­ing, and now we’re prepar­ing to start beta test­ing next week. This is one of my really huge projects at work, so it’s quite a relief to finally be at this point. It’s been a long and…educational road to get this far, but we’re get­ting very close. So far, the feed­back has been pretty good, and I’m look­ing for­ward to launch­ing it soon. This is one of the things I’ll be talk­ing about more here in the future but for now, I’ll just say that I couldn’t end the year on a bet­ter note.

This was also an amaz­ing year of travel for me, includ­ing spe­cial trips to the Nether­lands (and the won­der­ful DOK), south­east Asia, and Lon­don. I know how lucky I am to be invited to speak in these places, and I’m thank­ful for the peo­ple I’ve met and the expe­ri­ences I’ve had along the way. It’s easy to get tun­nel vision about loca­tion, region, type of library, or the pro­fes­sion in gen­eral, and my trav­els reminded me of the big­ger pic­ture and ded­i­ca­tion we all share.

I also trav­eled a lot domes­ti­cally this year, and while I know times aren’t easy, I hope we never lose the face-to-face con­nec­tions that are so valu­able to our pro­fes­sional and per­sonal devel­op­ment. Long live the con­fer­ence, uncon­fer­ence, regional meet­ing, or what­ever type of event brings us together. I hope that we as a pro­fes­sion can find the right com­bi­na­tion of online and offline to feed our pro­fes­sional con­nec­tions and growth.

Before this turns into one long verse of Kum­baya, though, there were hic­cups in the year, and there are some things I hope to change in 2009. I’ve got­ten much bet­ter about not spend­ing too many hours just work­ing or work­ing only on the com­puter, but those changes came at the expense of read­ing my RSS aggre­ga­tor and blog­ging here. I’m again exam­in­ing how I spend my time to try and fig­ure out a way to do more of both of those things. While I won’t go back to work­ing more or give up the time I’ve gained for fam­ily and friends, I do hope to redis­trib­ute some of that time to get back to blog­ging more.

So hope­fully you’ll see more action here in the com­ing year. In the mean­time, I hope 2008 was a good year for you, and that 2009 is even better!