>Art, you write more (word count /and/ content) in one blog posting to
>LibraryCog than my contributions in two journal articles.

Thanks Ross, but I still think of Mark Twain's apology for writing long
letters because it was so much harder to make them short :-) Maybe
"journal" is a misnomer, since I am not sure I am really thinking about a
linear stream of textual objects packaged with a table of contents. Two
thoughts come to mind:

1) when I was a kid in a small coal mining village, there was a tradition
where recipes were sometimes shared by putting a meal name, like
"shepherd's pie" on a sheet of paper and it was passed from house to
house. Ingredients and cooking strategies were shared, but the most
fascinating tidbits came from the marginalia ("you know that's too much
brown sugar", "evaporated milk works better", "never tried that, it might
work", "now I know why your oldest son is always at our house").

2) Dan Chudnov visited us in the spring and sketched out some of the ideas
that would appear in COinS and unAPI on a whiteboard. It was amazing, I
kept going back to the whiteboard every couple of days, and probably would
still be doing so if the cleaning staff didn't decide to erase it.

I guess I am looking for more recipe sharing, comments in the margins, and
whiteboarding, I wouldn't want to break or detract from anything that is
working now. All of this happens virtually at some level, but there's
still some impedance when compared to lightning talks and physical
gatherings, and sadly, there's a limit to how many conference events can
be mounted. I am convinced it has to be low barrier, the only reason blogs
probably produce more information flow than other platforms is because of
the audacious efficiencies of incremental processing. Add a ponderous
level, like an article submission to something like D-Lib, and the
overhead clogs the throughput. No slight against D-Lib and Adriane and the
rest, we need those too.

So I dunno, but if there's a gap between what can be done now with
technology and what can be achieved without over-engineering a solution,
this would be the group to figure it out. And maybe this is as good as it
gets, which is still better than it was (before irc and cool conferences
and all that), if that makes any sense.

art