Reading 2.0 slipped under my radar, but I guess that was the idea: to let people from O’Reilly, Los Alamos National Labs, OCLC, The Internet Archive, Adobe, Yahoo, Harvard and Elsevier hobnob away from prying eyes. I haven’t seen any audio/video for the event but Tim O’Reilly has a nice fly on the wall summary of what went on.

It’s refreshing to see library technologies/concepts such as OpenURL, OCOinS, OAI-PMH, FRBR, METS and Dublin Core starting to be talked about in the context of a larger information environment. For example I had no idea that Yahoo is harvesting data from the Internet Archive using the OAI-PMH protocol. And I didn’t know Yahoo is starting to leverage microformats, but should’ve guessed considering the recent news about Flickr starting to use hCard.

All in all these are exciting “lowercase semantic web” times we’re living in. And it’s interesting to watch some of the things people you know have worked on starting to catch on. Hopefully Reading 2.0 was just the start of this ongoing collaboration. Case in point, I just heard Robert Sanderson say in #code4lib that he’s visiting the a9 folks to talk about opensearch and sru. This is just the sort of cross-fertilization we need going on in library land.