I'm currently sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for my flight back to Atlanta. DIMA flew me out here to speak about Gallery during their portion of PMA 2008 (The "leading annual photo trade show and convention"). My session was D13 - Breakthroughs in Photo Archiving Using Metadata (read more on this page) and I was paired with Andrea de Polo from Alinari (The worlds oldest photography archive) and Jeff Sedlik from the PLUS Coalition (A new standards body for photography licensing and metadata). Over the last few months, the session format kept changing, but it ended up being a small talk by each of us. I spoke about Gallery and how we work with metadata including EXIF/IPTC and tags, Andrea spoke about challenges of building a searchable digital archive from a museum's perspective, and Jeff spoke about PLUS's forward momentum in universalizing all aspects of photo licensing. We didn't have much time for questions as part of the "panel", but I did have a few people come up to talk to me afterwards. One person from the real estate industry was interested in using Gallery for a major project, a project manager from a startup related to photography and outsourcing Photoshop work to Asia was curious if Gallery could help them roll out their project faster, and a Sandisk employee from Israel with some great ideas (and patents) about social networking just wanted to let me know that Open Source software shows that there is still hope for an America so consumed with personal financial gain. After my session (and a few others) was the DIMA keynote. I wasn't sure what to expect from this but turns out Ze Frank spoke for an hour on things ranging from his fear of flying and airline safety cards, to his adventures in becoming an internet phenomena and how important user created content is. It was very entertaining and I managed to talk to him for a minute after the keynote because he uses Gallery on his site but I didn't really know much about what the "big deal" about him was until seeing his talk. I walked the mile or so back to my gigantic hotel room (some pictures on my flickr) and put in a wake up call for 3:30am, and with that, today is going to be a long day! I'll be back in Atlanta around 4pm Eastern and hopefully will make it to the track tonight for some riding around in circles.