Today is our lucky day. I've got two great things to show you, neither of which I can claim any credit for, but both of which have blown me away. Maybe it's because I'm not a programmer, but maybe it's also because a whole lot of really smart people are "getting" this damn fast. Much more quickly than the library world has moved on things in the past. The distributed "think tank" mentality that the coversations in the biblioblogosphere are driving right now is freaking amazing. Exhibit A, via Tim Hodson:

Library 2.0 at Talis Insight 2005

"I Have spent the last two days at the Talis Insight 2005 conference. The main theme of the event was the idea of Library 2.0 being the next incarnation of libraries. (of course there were previews of future products too, with obligatory rebranding!!) library 2.0 follows the web 2.0 idea of using webservices to build web applications.

Talis seem to be embracing the open philosophy of much of the more exciting web developments that are happening. They seem willing to share the bibliographic records in talisbase (I think 27 million was quoted), along with holdings records and the records held in the silkworm directory....

Talis Whisper is a demo of what could be (a beta). I don’t go much for the usability aspects of this offering, but despite my grumblings, this is a fantastic taster of what could be. A google map to locate where the copies of those books are, an ILL form to fill in (THIS IS A DEMO!!), and even a facility to monitor opacs known to the directory for operational status, providing little balloons! All done with web services." [Information Takes Over]

Make sure you read the whole thing, and make sure you view the demo (and make sure you're using Firefox when you do it, because it doesn't work in IE-based browsers).

Talis is really impressing me these days with the speed at which they are moving. They've obviously embraced the whole "labs" idea (Google Labs, etc.), and they're making the most of it. I can't wait to see what they keep coming up with - really interesting!