In mid-May, I’m giving an hour-long talk at the Vermont Library Association’s Annual Conference about using social software in academic libraries. The majority of the population I’ll be talking to has not used any of these tools, so I’m trying to figure out what would be most valuable to talk about. I’m torn between providing a brief sketch of a whole bunch of these technologies or doing three technologies more in-depth (well, I’ll only have about 15 minutes for each, so it still won’t be that in-depth). I feel like the attendees might be overwhelmed by me going over a whole bunch of things, but on the other hand, I’d love to expose them to as much as possible. At the moment, I’m leaning towards just doing three technologies, but I’m not sure which ones I should focus on. So I thought I’d ask all my very smart readers, of the technologies listed below, which three do you think I should discuss in my talk? Which ones would be the most helpful to libraries that don’t have a lot of money and where the staff may not be the most tech-savvy?

  • Blogs
  • Wikis
  • RSS
  • Social Bookmarking
  • Screencasting
  • Instant Messaging
  • Podcasting
  • Social Networking Software (Facebook, MySpace, etc.)

If you have a good argument for me discussing more than three technologies, I’d love to hear it. I’m very open to your ideas. Thanks for your help! I want this talk to be as useful as possible for the attendees.