And, yes, I am blushing slightly as I write this on my keyboard. But I have at least, in some arcane memory reflux, remembered their answers. The three gurus agreed that the keyboard was a problem – all about speed, the crazy survival of Qwerty as an organizational principle, and the then low-status of keyboarding (only for clerks and secretaries). One said that voice was the obvious answer, and that perfecting voice recognition and, alongside it, linguistic exchange, was the only reasonable step forward. After all, merely going to another interface without solving the great problem that users do not understand each other’s languages was pointless. The next guy up said that we were entering the age of the sensor and the camera, and that all interfaces would be driven by video and image, with minimal input from choice keys on a selection device. And the third quoted William Gibson and insisted that we would be actors on our own stage, avatars within individualized interfaces where we could simply select the services we needed and “physically” go where we wanted to go in the networks.

Well, it was a long time ago, and billions of people are now using hopeless Qwerty to communicate in the network. But the predictions came to mind, and having uttered them, it also occurred to me that they need updating. For example, wearable computing seems like an effort to merge the man into the machine and this implies a wonderful world where, as Sergey Brin demonstrated to the  New York Times, even the Google inventor can become 60% machine on a transient basis. While the Singularity University always seems a bit like Silicon Valley at its most crackpot (http://singularityu.org/news/2010/06/the-new-york-times-explained-our-singular-purpose/) we are steadily interfacing with thinking computing in a way hard to envisage a decade ago, and we shall see the output of this first in workflow and process solutions.

The area of Media Lab work that most intrigued me all that time ago was Seymour Papert and LEGO. We were going to make such strides in education so quickly, but like our work on replacing this keyboard, progress has been agonizingly slow. But, soft, here comes Hope from South Korea, bearing a robot called EngKey who recognizes English and will replace all those gap year students in South Korean classrooms who are now, in the new austerity, too expensive to import. Anyway, humans were never so very good at teaching: you want something endlessly patient and wholly repetitive, as well as accurate in assessment. Robots are far better equipped. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/11/science/11robotside.html

So as it happens we were looking in the wrong direction in this discussion on interfaces. The key to change was not what we needed to do to interact better with the machine, but what the machine could be developed to do to work more sentiently with us. So only when the machine recognizes our facial expressions (http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/science/02-09EinsteinRobot.asp) and listens to our speech intonations will progress be made. Progress today, in terms of helping autistic children or pre-schoolers (the RUBI Project at San Diego), and progress tomorrow in terms of the productivity gains that robotics will deliver in workflow and information handling.

This is all a long diatribe to encourage all of us to keep reading science fiction and going to conferences where you don’t understand what is being said: if my experience is anything to go by, you one day will. And then you will be much more able to understand why some things happen immediately and some things seem to be going backward rather than forward. On the latter topic, I saw today (an event like the first cuckoo of Spring) my first report on what has happened at The Times following the imposition of the paywall: Experian Hitwise reports that during the five weeks when readers were asked to register their payment details, visits to the site fell 33%, and that they are now off by 66%. So where will they go when the introductory special offer comes off? You soon won’t even be able get your robot to read it.

First off the blocks were the New York Times , Apple Inc and Alphonso Labs Inc . Who ? You may be forgiven for not knowing that the last-named are a brand new , boys -in- their- early- twenties -working -in -a-Palo-Alto -garage set-up . We shall no doubt hear more of Akshay Kothari and Ankit Gupta , not least because their first product , the Pulse News Reader App for the iPad, was specifically mentioned last week in his WWDC speech by Steve Jobs , first in line of great Palo Alto garage graduates , as a great example of how Apps could focus usage and intensify reader experience .

So it was a great surprize when Pulse was withdrawn mid-week , apparently at the request of the New York Times . Was it because the Pulse advert featured the NYT in its frame ? Was it because the Pulse application was better than the NYT’s own reader app ( while it was up in its original state the app was downloaded in a few days 35,000 times at £2.39 each ) ? Or was it because , although as yet it has no paywall policy , the NYT objects in principle to being framed by anyone ( are we really going to get back to that tired old internet argument ) ? Or did the NYT simply want a cut of the action and didn’t know whom to ask ?

The iPad is the latest ace hookah from which we take our info-drugs . The Pulse App is simply a smarter way of collecting RSS feeds , for which individuals could register for free , and playing them on the new hookah through a software called Safari , which everyone , including NYT , have to use if they are to have access to the new habit . The boys from the garage just gave the NYT 35,000 new subscribers to a service they already offer , and featured the NYT in their advertisements . Seems to me that editors with bouquets should attend their garage doors , not lawyers with writs . And Apple , far from removing the kids ( who won a Stanford Institute of Design award for this ) should give them a job . But Apple , having moved from hardware/software supplier to access controller and owner of the user profile on the Web , must now play a different game with content suppliers . And this one is a dangerous one .Apple , like Google in a similar role , would be too powerful in this position to make life comfortable for either growers or smokers .

( PS I understand that Pulse has now gone back up – with the NYT amputated . Who does that help ? )

At the same time in California a noisy spat was taking place between the University of California and Nature Publishing Group . Nature has been renegotiating its deal with the California Digital Library . Talks surrounded the depth of discount that the library should enjoy : Nature says it currently gives California an 88% discount on its list prices , and wants this to be close to the average of 50% that it gives other users , while California stigmatizes this as a 400% price increase .  California wrote an open letter to faculty representatives on its ten campuses , thus “outing ” the argument  in an attempt to put public pressure on Nature . , who point out that they have capped list prices at 7%, and are the major publisher most compliant with the so-called ” green agenda ” of open access .

No one is going to win this one either . Nature’s output is  “must-have ” to an outfit of California’s standing , but not beyond price . As a major buyer the university authorities could imagine that by making an example of a medium-sized player they will soften up the negotiations with the larger lists of Elsevier , Wiley-Blackwell or Springer . Both parties are in a recession , and both will plead poverty and the need to guarantee survival . It is however as unthinkable that California will not supply its students and researchers with Nature magazine at an average download price , under Nature’s proposed pricing , of $0.56 per download , as it is that Nature will walk away from an institution where its authors litter every street corner . So who blinks first , and who blows smoke in the faces of addicts and users everywhere ?

At the end , these are power plays . Is the University a big enough power block to make its will felt , and can the newspaper use its ownership any more to control how the end-user views its content ? These struggles used to take place behind closed doors . Then the golden rules were – never push your power too far , for in the exercise of using it you are losing it . NYT is clearly some way down that track : if the University of California forces its students to subscribe seperately to Nature then it too begins to lose control of the argument . How much do you need it and can you kick the habit are still powerful questions in the world of commoditized information .

In more sober moments we inevitably discussed two urgent issues amongst the many strands pursued by speakers . The conference opened on Paywall Tuesday , the day when the Times and the Sunday Times launched their joint suicide pact . This topic reverberated around us on both days , with contrary viewpoints taken by speakers who felt , much as Peter Preston did in today’s Observer ((30 May 2010) that a facsimile newspaper would find a small and loyal audience , while others , including the afore-mentioned rock-god , felt that even if you argued  for the value and distinctive nature of the Times ” journal of record ” status and its very high quality columnists ,  the thing to do was to sell these values for themselves and sell them seperately , not look back over one’s shoulder at a format which , literally , now belongs in another world .

But that world was always with us . The other major topic was the future history of the iPad . Adam Hodgkin even passed his round the audience ( there was relief on his face when it eventually came back ) and both he and OUP’s Evan Schnittman dilated interestingly on business modela and distribution in a device -laden world . The sceptics said that the iPad had found the enthusiasts , but not yet a definition of use in a mass market . We may have to wait for 3.0 for the right functionality , but who cares , since we Europeans are still awaiting 1.0 .No one went to the wonderful extremes of Sue Halpern in May’s edition of The New York Review of Books . This is worth quoting ” In fact , Web browsing on the iPad is less than ideal …..But why bother going through a browser to get to YouTube or to read the AP headlines or check the weather when there is a dedicated app for each of these ? This is what is really revolutionary and game changing about the iPad: once there is an app for everything , its Apple’s Web , not the wide world’s ” Wow , this lady is obviously a rock-goddess !

Meanwhile , in the conference room we were more likely to decide that Google was the threat to the Web that needed attention . We covered video advertising , noted the return of display courtesy of Hugo Drayton (Inskin) , and looked at classifieds through the well-educated eyes of Fish 4 . In a hugely impressive session , Louise Rogers , the CEO of TSL Education , gave an object lesson in how to create community and fill it with user-derived content  – and fascinated many of us by her consistent refusal to go for instant monetization , preferring to build community strength in depth to continue to support her recruitment advertising model . This seemed admirable , though the proper approach will be tested by UK  government spending cuts in her sector – and the eventual wish of her private equity investors to make an exit . Her case study , and excellent demonstrations of clear strategic thinking at the Economist , at Bloomsbury publishing and at Complinet meant that no one could leave the room without the conviction that the digital revolution is now over . We even began a serious discussion of the semantic web without a single groan from a full audience representing some 120 industry players .

My apologies : I cannot mention each exceptional speaker by name . But any meeting that starts ( when he reached us ) with a keynote from Simon Waldman , looking back at his Guardian years and the ” creative destruction ” of the markets in which he worked  , and ended with Shane O’Neill giving a rallying cry of hope  based on the re-use of ex-government data  was not short on inspiration . I came away exultant : this industry is going to make it , and neither Google nor Apple can do anything to stop us !

In my last blog on this subject I merely mentioned Foursquare (http://foursquare.com/ and on the strength of that ( perhaps)  founder Dennis Crowley went off in search of series B funding at around $80m . This round had , says the SFGate  Business Insider service , ” every VC and their mother humping ( FourSquare’s) leg ” . Come to think of it , it wasn’t me who encouraged this : we rather frown on the uncontrollable urges of dogs and VCs in this village . Then came the news that the competition between FourSquare and Gowalla was resolving in favour of  the former , though both had a boost at SXSW (don’t ask ) and Foursquare told Bloomberg on Friday that they had moved from 170,000 users in December to 1 million now . Also since I wrote my piece the press has quoted Facebook and Microsoft as potential bidders , and some have even imagined Yahoo buying it for $100 million. Bloomberg quote an analyst called Kip Cassino ( cometh the hour , cometh the man with the name ) as estimating location -based services at an annual ad-spend of $4.1 billion in five years ((23 April) .

The Guardian’s Jemima Kiss has the right idea in her article online on 26 April : this is the three dimensional Nectar card ( think store discount cards in the US ). Local sites in the US have tracked around 2000 businesses signing up in California , and in the UK the first signatory was – the FT .(http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/pda/2010/apr/12/foursquare-ft) We award Rob Grimshaw our prize for adroit brand association , and love the alliance with business schools alongside this .

And , no , I am not diverted by Blippy ( www.blippy.com ) , the what-I-bought-where site , and the news this week that a third of Craigslist’s income comes from advertising porn and prostitution only gets me excited in the sense that if they are getting $36m from this source , and they are the champions of free listings , then there is a great marketplace in the non-porn sector . Truth to tell , the concentration of service values on the geolocational mobile computer we will still insist on calling a phone is now and will in future become so great that , like Foursuare , new worlds will be created in the made-for-mobile sector which only come down to earth and internet when different types of processing and communications are  needed. For an interesting example , look at Plyce , the French version of all of this (www.plyce.com).

At a dinner this week I found myself talking to a revered former CEO from the regional press . I mentioned the great press baron(et) of Farnham , Sir Ray Tindle , whose average circulation of his many local titles , was , when I went to see him in the 1990s , around 12,000. Yet there was real profit in his enterprizes and a huge local lock-in for services which , then , people regarded as their own . That ownership is the trick that Facebook has pulled off in the internet , and which Foursquare can do in the geolocational sphere . The Guardian think they will be at 3 million by the end of the summer , but the important matter is that each of those users feel that they are living in a village of their own making , though it is one they can take with them wherever they go . Sir Ray , when I spoke to him , said that he had just bought the local newspaper in Llanwit Major – ” Its my size of town ! ” he said . I think that he would love Foursquare and see the opportunity to define the town , and eventually the newsflow and everything else , in the virtual mind-mapping of the individual , and even create custom print for him one day .

I shall be back here in a few weeks , having missed the UK  election campaign . However , I have cast my postal vote , and if my fellow citizens follow my lead then we shall have a completely new country by mid-May . On reflection , I think that geolocational services may be a better bet !

The Thomson Reuters markets division will become two simplified platforms by the autumn , dealing with enterprize users on the one hand , and individual users and small operators on the other . These platforms will be web-based , and the Thomson Reuters servers will be able to be moved alongside  client servers to ensure lower operational costs . The web -based environments clearly are designed to appeal to a new generation in the industry which joined since trading platforms were in place , as well as providing a contrast with the Bloomberg insistence on its dedicated terminals ( Shades of the dedicated Lexis box ! )

And something else as well . Andrew quotes Devin Wenig, the CEO of Thomson Reuters Markets , as saying ” The industry is a hugely different place from where it was in April 2008 ( when the Thomson Reuters merger took place ) and we think a lot of changes are permanent and structural. Big banks are disapearingbut we’ve created 1000 new accounts in …six months ”

And there is surely the essence . Players in rapidly restructuring networked markets will themselves have to be slimmer , do more on less and enable their clients to do more in the network at least for the same pricing . And that new generation of clients will expect a  greater fluency in customization and personalization  along with better risk management and improved collaboration features ( the launch of Eikon ) as well as interfaces to news and information ( like Insider ) which source video as well as text and allow brokers to offer analysis on video to their clients across the platform .

In short , Thomson Reuters are , with a few exceptions , facing very similar issues to those faced by a Pearson in education , or an Elsevier in STM . And from here on in the parallelism ceases and turns into convergence . Thomson Reuters announced a deal last week to bring Palantir’s QA Studio software to its platforms . This type of quantitative analysis allows data exploration , do pattern identification , test alpha strategies and collaborate . This pushes on with the developments in data mining began with ClearForest three years ago , and again parallels what is alreday happening ( Palantir’s markets are the intelligence , defense and law enforcement communities  ! )

Where does the next push come ? Well , data management is now crucial , and so is compliance and risk management/reduction . And that sounds just like the issues facing diagnostic systems in the medical marketplaces . Often in financial markets there is too much news , and it is insufficiently auto or machine analysed , and human intervention takes too long : this points towards further pressure for automated news tagging so that it can be submitted directly to computerized trading systems . And here another common broad market problem occurs . Users and regulators begin to exert pressure at the lowest levels of data organization for common standards to emerge  ( XBRL would be the case study in the finance field ). This moves the competition zone up a level , but that competitive element must remain because it drives everything forward . Without it , common standards turn into a reason for not changing anything . So play up , lads and play the game ! We still have to tackle workflow and process improvement before the end of this long information industry day !

This may sound over dramatic  , but the arrival of the £1 per day /£2 per week pay wall at the Times needs to be seen this way , or as some sort of outlandish joke . The problem facing the Times was about recreating its relationships with eitherits advertisers or with its readers . There is no strategic reason for the paywall : it is simply the expression of tired managerial brains , cudgelled by a demanding owner , saying ridiculous things like ” Well , we put so much effort into it that we should be able to get a £1 for it …” or   , even worse , ” People don’t recognize our value so we must make them pay for it …”

There is great value in the Times , even if too much of its news reporting is agency rewrites . There is value in its journal of record status , in its commentators and in its editorial position , when that does not refect its owner’s desire to play political kingmaker . Under Murdoch it is far reduced from even its Thomson days . Its brand still has power and value . What was needed was the skill and insight to stop and start again. What is the user relationship online ? What value add features , branded by the Times but searching the entire web through a Times-created focus , are valuable enough to become desktop attributes , a way of organizing and personalizing the news for the fixed , or seperately , for mobile markets ?What rich subcommunities does the Times have around its citeable Law Reports , or its obituaries , or its classifieds , that could become a platform for user exchange within the Times brand ? While Times Online has done some good and innovative things over the past five years , none of them got a look in at the end . Instead we got the crass decision : it is a newspaper in the real world , and being no different on the Web , we charge £1 for it

I learn from Jeff Jarvis and Michael Wolff in various quotations that Rupert Murdoch does not use the Internet , but that he has recently started to use email . This may explain the stumbling , stubborn road to ruin on the Web . My Space was bad enough:there was an opportunity to innovate and stay in front . Arguably Facebook should never have made it if Murdoch’s men had not thought that buying market share was enough ,and had realized instead that buying market share just gives you an opportunity to tune and develop service attributes from the front of the market , not the back . .

Now News is ailing . They provide casebook examples of how difficult it is for real world media executives , even if they are His Children and Trusted Cronies  , to make network publishing decisions without any network publishing experience . With advertizing markets down , growth in satellite curtailed by regulators and the Chinese government , and Fox becoming a politicized space that does not appeal to all communities and advertizers , it is possible to imagine the rise and fall of this media Imperium within the single generation of a remarkable dealmaker who never really understood the media he owned . None of which quite quenches my anger about the Times . .

You are being taken down this track by someone under pressure, from friends and colleagues, allegedly “interested in what you will say about the sale of the Guardian’s regional newspapers.”  I am not so moved.  The deal is trivial and, given the UK regional press, inevitable.  The consideration is only interesting if you recall that two years ago DMGT refused an offer of  £1 billion for its Northcliffe regional company: valued at the the price point established by this latest deal they would now get, by my calculation, £220 million.  One of the disadvantages of reserving all voting rights to A shareholders, and they all being family and friends, is that you lock in a sentimental regard for the past as well as defending yourself against predators.  Meanwhile, back at the Guardian, we have all long acknowledged that the not-for-profit trust at GMG can only act to protect the newspaper.  More locked in sentiment.  The Guardian has 37 million registered online users, but exists to keep the print.  Then I, who love the paper, say turn print into the offshoot of the web and create custom newspapers deliverable  from local print centres working on contract to deliver to subscribers within 12 hours of  customization.  The next attack must be on the print works.

But the voices I am really moved to write about are on mobile phones.  Two discussions this week convince me that we are not taking the mobile or the mobile network seriously enough.  We are still in the Stone Age of mobile content.  Is there not something faintly ridiculous about Steve Jobs telling the media last week that they were doing a grand job, and their content was ” invaluable”?  And the media having an attack of the shivers about Apple not giving them enough user data, or allowing them to connect print or web subscriptions to the Apple store subscription.  Truth to tell, I cannot think of a single media property that is “have to have” on an iPad.  You buy the device , and then it is “nice” to be able to read a Murdoch newspaper on it (possibly nicer there than anywhere, given the obliterating possibilities of “delete”).  Sports Illustrated seems to be taking the platforms of mobility seriously, but for the most part inflexible real world content , or lightly reheated web content is the menu on offer.  When the content/service/solution is so hot that you can give away the reader with the subscription, then we will know that we have cossed the great divide.  Until then, the content industry just has a crossed line.

So who does know anything about this?  Well , the B2B boys are well down the track.  Here is the voice of the head of IT at the US insurer Nationwide, talking to the FT about his mobile apps: “For the best experience, it is better not to have a web-based version [of the application] but one that is specific, depending on what the user is doing. It is about having right functionality.”

“It is not just a question of designing applications so they fit on a mobile device’s smaller screen, he says, but providing the right amount of task-specific information to field-based staff.  Too often, re-purposed PC or web applications produce cluttered screens, and frustrated users.”

So this will be our test bed.  B2B publishers will want to quickly integrate content into mobile workflow models.  Apps will become cheaper and cheaper to originate and customize and a great deal of current workflow and process content work will migrate into mobile, after existing for a while in both fixed line and mobile networks.  Commercial users will “publish ” for themselves, and content originators will become systems integrators ( proprietory and third party content integrated with process software to drive solutions), as well as sellers of key standard pieces of functionality.

In the course of time those who survive these troubled media years will be publishing fluently to all of the networks.  I do hope the Guardian is one of them.  And I am certain that by then the hegemony of the keyboard will have been broken, and we shall be communicating with these platforms in the most natural mode possible – our Voices.

Sometimes these books are scarcely worth reading.  Especially in America, where more banalities on business are pressed within hard covers more quickly than in any other place on Earth.  If you think this when you see “Newsonomics” by Ken Doctor in your bookstore, pick it up and read it.  This is something quite different: descriptive prose and fresh insight about the news business by someone who knows how to interview, can argue a case in lucid English, and writes with the sympathy of an insider and the distance of a practised analyst.  This is no accident.  Ken did more than 20 years, man and boy, before the mast in newspapers, and latterly in the now defunct Knight Ridder, where he had the helm in digital enterprises  in San Jose.  Here at least they took the approaching digital tsunami seriously, even if elsewhere they were unable to ride out the storm.  Ken then became a celebrated news media analyst, both on his own Content Bridges blog and for Outsell.

So this should be good.  And it does not disappoint.  Here you will find a good analysis of what happens in a media segment when the classical gatekeeper editorial role becomes diminished in Authority.  You can see here an industry contracting and consolidating as cyclical change becomes structural.  The growing disaffection of readers is matched by the inability of news providers to come up with any recognition of what their readers now want, and the people who read that disaffection most accurately are the advertisers, who quietly head off elsewhere.  Meanwhile new aggregators re-intermediate with new solutions, turning the old suppliers into secondary sources – and sometimes free sources at that. Meanwhile, readers are becoming newsmen, local is being reborn, and community in the network begins to recreate news forms which in print had taken two hundred years to evolve.  Reporters get to be bloggers, niche is more important than general and everyone is Editor.  A new form of marketing is born around viral distribution, which begins to suggest new roles for news media.  This is a great story, and it has not been told in a better analytic style than here.

By the time I came to the end I almost shed a tear for old Rupert M, struggling on past pension age to feed the family and make sense of all of this.  Ken’s analysis makes it clear to me that you cannot buy your way in (My Space-style). You have to build it and know it, experiment through failure to success.  And you cannot postpone it with a paywall, or hope that television will be immune.  In some ways the visual world of the web will sap the defences of television news more rapidly, aided by the filtering of Twitter and the super-distribution of YouTube.

By a glorious irony, Ken’s publisher is St Martins Press (Macmillan) the global super-publisher who forced little old Mom-and-Pop digital corner bookstore Amazon into a price deal that they did not want in the public interest despite the fact that it increased their margins.  This should mean that the eBook version should be out now too, but even if it isn’t, order this on Amazon or www.stmartins.com ( ISBN978-0-312-59893-8).  Worth every penny of whatever John Sargent tells Jeff Bezos it is worth.

History does this.  Eighteenth century libertarians in England looked back at a world of idealized Anglo-Saxon common lands and village councils, and deplored enclosures and loss of liberty.  Now we look back at the enclosed parkland estates as the real world that we have lost.  In the same way, newspaper owners who have long lost touch with the ill-written bastardized press releases used in Britain’s regional press to divide columns of advertising, and who have spent a decade firing the ignoble hacks who produced this nutrition-free copy in order to maximize margins, now appear on high horse to defend their high-value ”content” from web users when those Anglo-Saxon peasants have the cheek (or innocence) to want to link similar references together in the collaborative world of the web.  Only this week did the Intellectual Property Director of NewsInternational liken linking to shoplifting (Guardian letters, 25 January 2009) and protest that ” The public is well-served by companies like News that invest in creativity”.

And then, still worse, the CEO of Trinity Mirror uses last week’s Oxford Media Convention to lambast local government-run news sheets as “mini-Pravdas” which provide a further source of unfair competition for her declining news output.  Here indeed is an industry first: whoever heard of British local government, when mentioned in the pages of the regional press, ever getting anything right  ?  But here, like the BBC, they now appear to be a rival.  Perhaps this is because they generally cannot afford to rewrite the press releases, and are therefore compelled to pass them on accurately?  Or have they taken to employing the wordsmiths fired by the private sector?  The real issue here, as with the newspapers of Mr Murdoch, may be about political influence, but that somehow does not seem to be a cause for concern.

When we get to write the history of these headless days in the decline and fall of the Press, we will wonder at the lack of strategic appreciation.  It is not just that the co-operative web community environment is wholly alien to people who sell a bundle of folded paper sheets to each of many isolated, individual citizens.  It is the lack of thinking around scale and impact which is so surprising.  This week produced a classic example.  The UK start-up Rightmove, founded by real property resellers and now a quoted company, dominates the UK market.  In 2007, Mr Murdoch came in with a rush and bought smaller and more specialized services like Globrix and Propertyfinder.  Last year News International sold off these interests, and this year DMGT bought Globrix, and put it into its Digital Property Group with Findahome, Findaproperty and PrimeLocation.  This gives DMGT a large but second ranked portfolio of services in a market where its ability to command the attention of real estate agents is much diminished.  The other News Corp property, PropertyFinder, has gone to Zoopla, the alternative community trade model which cuts out, or at least cuts down, the agent middleman.  Strategically, neither DMGT or News feels like an expensive competitive auction for Rightmove: equally, neither could face up to a business model that meant cutting the throats of their erstwhile advertisers, the real estate agents.  Result: strategic paralysis.  Reasons for hope: DMGT is no longer dependent on selling newsprint for over 50% of its revenues and profits.  And neither is Hearst.  What would William Randolph and Lord Alfred have made of that?

Instead I have had demos of everything I wanted to see.  The aisles have looked fairly crowded but no-one jostled me. I have asked my questions , and even had sensible answers to some of them.  I started by working out exactly what I wanted to see: always a good move at a huge trade show but one that I seem to rarely accomplish.  I settled on a day of looking at Readers: Copia, the Liquidvista prototype, MSI eReader, PlasticLogic QUE (one of the most impressive – and a Cambridge UK development!), the Skiff,  Spring Design’s Alex, the Booken Orizon, the Entourage Edge and the Microsoft Courier dual screen digital codex (why are we suddenly into that word “codex”? – it produces Leonardo da Vinci in my mind).

Then I thought, if I had time after all those stands, I would like to look at the Samsung display and evaluate the E6 and the E10.  And I missed Steve Ballmer of Microsoft using the HP Slate at the opening press conference (I didn’t have a ticket!) so I would rather like to catch up on that, as well as previewing the Dell Streak and Cydle M7.  Well , I did get to see the Ballmer demo, and I also visited those other stands.

And I had a ton of help.  Hats off to Matthew Bernius and his colleagues at the Open Publishing Lab at RIT for gathering all this stuff up in one place for me.  And three cheers for the great people at Engadget , Gizmodo and Teleread for doing the videos and demos and evaluations of all these things, and for answering my fool questions for all the world as if I knew what I was talking about (and to their communities, who spotted a sucker immediately).  And to Bobbie Johnson and the Guardian for getting me in to the Ballmer session and then restlessly videoing the crowded aisles and fevered sales pitches: quite beyond the call of duty.

So I am off to bed now.  A little tired but quite energized by what I have seen.  But there is just one thing I cannot work out.  If I was CES , wouldn’t I put all of these links and demos and ideas on my own site, and run it year round, and offer to continually update punters like me, and create a community which includes all who went to Vegas, and those like me who stayed at home.  The current CES site is a good news site but hardly an eCommerce, 365 days a year community experience.  In the past year I have spoken to two of the greatest business event operators in the world about this, and while they talk the talk of network connectivity they do little more.  One day the physical event will be the satellite activity, and the web will be the core: I hope they transfer their brands successfully before that happens.