If our kids tell you that they’ve been fed nothing but baked beans for too many dinners in the next few months…I’m afraid they’ll be telling the truth.

Their parents are preoccupied with the serious business of Getting Ready For Canberra.

The Co-Pilot flies over at Easter because his Fremantle-based choir, Voicemale, will be performing at the National Folk Festival. Their set is around the theme “A New Agenda”. They are thinking of their all-male blokey group singing “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves“. As I write this, there is the “thump, thump,thump” of someone keeping time upstairs as he arranges “Brass in Pocket“. So lots of singing and practice and co-ordination for him until April.

Me..well, I’m busy making movies and taking snapshots in Second Life. I’ll be in Canberra for something else in early February. To calm my nerves and kill some time, I emailed Matthew Stuckings at the National Library to ask whether I could meet someone to chat about what we’ve been doing with the Australian Libraries Building in Second Life.

Well…they were interested, and now I’ll be giving a public talk about Second Life as part of their “Digital Culture” series, on Wednesday February 14th 12:30pm – 1:30pm in the Library Theatre.

If it was on any other topic, I’d be really daunted. I was daunted..but I decided to do it partly because it’s a really invigorating topic for me…and I know enough about it to talk for an hour (half an hour plus questions!)..and I’d love to see people’s faces as they experience SL for the first time. And… an hour after it was suggested to me, I read Ivan Chew’s post about “chickening out” of being on blogTV.SG.

In my talk, I’ll be pointing out that Second Life provides new chances to collaborate. It’s been illustrated by the four or five generous Second Life Librarians who have shared with me their power point slides they used for live presentations. If anyone reading this has any ideas of what I should include or what they think people would want to know, feel free to contact me.

I’m doing a practice run at MPOW on February 9th for WA academic librarians. I hope to do a live demo for both talks, but am getting together lots of movies and snapshots as backup for both. (Hence my new toy).

The talk is titled “Flying Librarians of Oz: What’s all the fuss about Second Life and what’s it got to do with libraries?“. More info on the NLA Events page. (Now, if I’ve used Cite Bite properly, that link should go to the page, then magically jump down to a yellow highlighted heading, “Digital Culture Talk.)

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Content