"Despite the imbalanced nature of several panels, the conference was still well worth attending, with some terrifically sharp questions from the audience and some combative give and take on panels such as the State of the Industry roundtable, where Intertainer CEO Jonathan Taplin said his startup was willing to take on the Hollywood studios in court, after the studios had cut the number of movies available to his company from 1,500 titles to 15. The verbal shot across the bow, as it turned out, was accompanied by court papers, which were being filed the very same moment in federal court, alleging that the studios had violated antitrust laws by forming their own cartel, Movielink. (The San Jose Merc has the story today here.)" [JD's New Media Musings]

I'm posting this for the benefit of the nice lady from the Algonquin Area Public Library District who attended our panel presentation about PDAs at the Illinois Library Association conference today. She's thinking ahead (as AAPLD is wont to do), and she wants to know if there are any companies out there distributing digital videos that the Library could circulate.

Of course, my immediate answer is no, only because I don't think any of them will work with libraries at this point, but JD's post reminded me of Intertainer, and in my archives, you'll find a post about Pocket PC Films making movies available for download at airport kiosks. I've linked to another company in the past, but naturally I can't find the link at the moment. I'll post it when I do, though. Since I wasn't the only presenter today, I tried not to get up on too high a soapbox, and as a result, I didn't say everything I wanted to today.

I often end my own presentations by urging librarians to initiate discussions with their vendors about wireless and remote access to their content. If we don't start asking the questions now and pushing them to move forward, we won't be ready when the public begins asking us for these services.

I thought the quote of the day came from Tom Peters from CIC noted that in the future, being offline will be the choice, not being online.

For myself, I was thrilled to find out that Algonquin is considering an Audible purchase (Matt - give 'em a call!), and the Barrington Area Library just installed an 802.11b (we think it's b) wireless network.

"The second season of HBO's The Mind of the Married Man introduces a new character: his TiVo. In "The Cream of the Crop", the Married Man's TiVo thinks he's gay. So he spends some time trying to convince TiVo that he's not, by recording Manly Shows." [The Peanut Gallery]