At Connect and Collaborate, I met Liz Lawley who gave a great talk on social software. Liz has a dream job, a year’s fellowship at Microsoft, where she can just poke around and get herself involved in projects that interest her. I learned a lot from her keynote, and was motivated to get out and look at more of what’s happening outside of the heads-down network analysis that’s been keeping me busy of late. I expect to do a lot of writing in the next few months, so the first thing I did was sign onto del.icio.us. She also talked about some very interesting software you can use to find out who else in the world is in the same place in the world that you are. Traveling brings on the urge to do that.

After leaving New York, and after stays in Virginia, Maryland (Rockville), Davidsonville (near Annapolis), and Oshkosh WI, I landed in Chicago for the two-day ONA Masterclass that I give. Prior to the trip, I got in touch with Jack Vinson. I thought I would like to meet him and perhaps have him come and talk to the class about MeshForum. He and
“>Shannon Clark invited me to a MeshForum dinner that just happened to be happening that Wednesday, where I met a few other bloggers who are out and about. Buzz Bruggeman has been traveling a lot to market his software product ActiveWords. Jim McGee was there as well, whom I thought was rather brilliant.

So that about doubled the number of active bloggers I know, and then there was a bonus: Lilia Efimova, whom I’ve admired for sometime, was in Chicago for a conference and also showed up for the dinner. Lilia and I met for breakfast Friday morning — it was her birthday! — and talked about her research on knowledge management and weblogs. In addition to studying corporate weblogs (including 8 weeks of research at Microsoft), Lilia is working on a network map of the knowledge management blogging community. She showed me some of her files in UCINET and I promised to look deeper and help her with some ONA questions.

And of course Lilia knows Liz, so that was a nice shortcut to dots.

I had another serendipitous f2f in Chicago. While I was in Oshkosh with my Mom, my cousin Janny called my Mom to see how she was doing (Mom is half-way through chemotherapy for ovarian cancer). When Janny and I chatted we discovered we’d both be in Chicago Thursday evening, so arranged dinner with herself, her husband Ken and their daughter Kelly (whom I had not seen since she was a toddler). It’s good to keep these distant family connections going, and it was a real treat to see them.

Now it turns out that there is a new linking tool for those who travel and seek good wireless networking spots and are generally clueless about where in the world others they know may be in the world. It’s called Plazes and it looks pretty darn cool. When you have the software and have signed in you can see yourself and others on a map of the local area — bingo, just like smart tags, you get a signal if a friend is near. I’m not eager to get back on the road just now, but do expect that I’ll pack Plazes on my laptop for my next trip