There used to be a soap opera in ITV, Britain's first commercial TV company, called Crossroads, whose productions values were so low that the sets would visibly wobble when anyone entered a room. It is well remembered for the time one of its regular characters, a mechanic called Benny, popped out to get a spanner one episode to reappear again five years late with no explanation of what had happened in the intervening time – and no spanner either. Characters re-emerging with little or no explanation are not uncommon however, Sherlock Holmes came back after being killed off at the Reichenbach falls, Bobby Ewing emerged from the shower several series of Dallas after his supposed demise looking none the worse for wear. People do it all the time on the long running BBC radio programme the Archers, but no one bats an eyelid because they never saw them in the first place. So hopefully its no big deal really that my last post on this blog was five years ago. I'd like to to think that this is some kind of a record, but suspect it isn't.

It's not that I totally turned my back on social networking tools, there's my flickr presence for example (which may be possibly give some pointers as to why I have taken so long to get round to updating my blog), and I occasionally get round to entering details of my jogging on mapmyrun, I have 3 friends on BEBO, have been reunited with a few more elsewhere and I do have a wiki somewhere. I'd like to point out that if I don't look as fit in my flickr pictures as my mapmyrun training regimes suggests I should, I am still looking for mapmyguinnessandkebabintake.com

I have been moved to resume my blogging after attending day 1 of the Internet Librarian International 2007 conference. Stephen Abrams in his keynote address recalled the words of British Library director Caroline Brazier's who suggested that librarians are welcome not to embrace web 2.0 – provided they take early retirement first. Clearly we are living in interesting times and I no longer think it is possible to get the full measure of what is happening and what it means to the profession by merely dabbling occasionally. It is also a fabulous opportunity to learn by playing. I missed Phil Bradley's closing keynote, having zipped up on the sleeper to Edinburgh the night before, but fortunately his slides are available because they raise a number of issues which deserve consideration.

Other highlights included Dave Pattern, University of Huddersfield, speaking about web 2.0 and the OPAC, The Impact of 2.0: lipstick, cowbells and serendipity in the OPAC. Brian Kelly, UKOLN, on barriers to blogging and how these can be addressed - The blogging librarian: avoiding institutional inertia and Helene Blowers presentation on the development of "23 things" Learning 2.0: it’s all about play!