
The oddness of Twitter…meeting people for the first time who seem like old friends at #bib12
— Ania Wieckowski (@agwieckowski) October 25, 2012
Ania Wieckowski, Harvard Business Review’s Managing Editor, is nothing if not a poised tweeter.
She sweetly tweeted this — or tweetly sweeted it — at this week’s continually provocative Books in Browsers (#BiB12) publishing conference in San Francisco.
This is one of the lesser known confabs in publishing, invitational and demanding, keenly focused on the future of the book and our relation to it.

The conference was co-produced by the Internet Archive in San Francisco (thank you, Peter Brantley) and O’Reilly Media (thank you, Kat Meyer and Joe Wikert).
BiB embraced the Archive’s latest milestone, 10 petabytes of data, in a celebration led by founder Brewster Kahle.
Meanwhile, Wieckowski and I have been in touch on Twitter for a year or more. Guy Gonzalez introduced us online, artful bringer-together that he is. But we’d never met in person.
Wieckowski sought me out during one of the conference’s 15-minute breaks.
After a hug and a grin, we chatted beside my live-tweeting command center at the door of the sanctuary, dodging our passing-jostling colleagues as if we were the kind of joggers who trot around each other a few times in order to exchange morning pleasantries.
This pattern would repeat itself throughout the two long days of great material at Books in Browsers. Although I had met some of my favorite Twitter correspondents who were there in person, others — like Wieckowski — were still virtual-only to me. [Read more…]