Will be here at Gnomedex at home in Seattle for the next couple days. It will be interesting to hear John Edwards speak... about blogging?

Unfortunately some of the sessions overlap with important world cup matches. You don't have many chances to see Brazil avenge the '98 loss to France.

I am late getting to this post but still had some thoughts.

The New York Times recently had an interesting article from Kevin Kelly on book search in the  NY Times Sunday Magazine. The whole concept of the web as disruptive force on traditoinal media models is really interesting when thinking about book publishing as it is quite different than the situation with other media.

TV, magazines, newsapers and other forms of media have at least path where they can migrate the existing business models (however painful it may be) to the web where they are then accessed by the public. The book business is still at the point where the web only serves as another sales channel and not necessarily a place to consume the book content itself. 

Earlier in my career I spent time advising a division of a major educational publisher on moving parts of their business on the web. This was a rather frustrating experience at times. Somewhat like Google (in my own small way) I workd to convince them that they should digitize all of their back catalog and then we could figure out exactly how to build a business model around it. The cost was not small, as no one offered it up for free at that time, and the management of the company could not fully understand how breaking up all of their assets into bite sized digital chunks would help their business. At the end of the day, they still wanted to sell more books.