I'll bet you brushed your teeth though! Great points Phil. I often wonder if the universe would even notice if I just stopped all online activity. I used to feel that way if I didn't read the Wall Street Journal & StarTribune every morning, and catch the evening news. Now they feel valueless and mostly irrelevant (and more entertainment than news). The tough part for many with social media is seeing what everyone else thinks and is doing and then doing that vs. leading. I admire those who shut it all out and just go do what their gut tells them. But, of course, if I was 25 again I'd probably be meeting hotties on Twitter and investing inordinate amounts of time tweeting with 'em! ;-)

Sally, I'll wager we were at that same conference (ETech?) and it was exactly as you described. When wifi connections became the norm at tech conferences in roughly 2002 or so, there was an explosion in use. People would bring laptops in droves and often it was tough to even get a connection...let alone have it be of any reasonable speed. What's *really* interesting is how another huge conference--South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, TX--was one where people would do the same thing...but this past spring many top bloggers were writing about how few laptops they were seeing. Instead (as one blogger put it) "everyone had iPhones and some even told me that they didn't even bring their laptop!" which is pretty atypical. Unfortunately, AT&T had a major hiccup in having enough connectivity for a sudden influx of so many iPhones...but I digress. Thanks for the comment!

Dan -- Guess my satirical view wasn't apparent enough (as was my Photoshopping of the actual NYT page to make it appear as headlines only). My point was that an in-depth publication like the NYTimes (which I subscribe to *and* consume with both an iPhone app and the new, awesome, Times Reader 2.0 app) would be worthless as a headlines-only publication and that, unfortunately, our society is increasingly looking at headlines with little drill-down or critical thinking about the depth and breadth of a story.

just typed up a bunch of feedback but tried to Preview AND IT DISAPPEARED. Can you say, "ironic?"

One thing is clear to me: THE primary 'container' for an individual or company value proposition is humanized and best delivered in a blog. Mine has been instrumental in the following and more: multiple six figures in revenue in the last 24 months; vaulted me into conversations with thought leaders and others globally; provided me with a value-stake-in-the-ground I can point to and leaders I approach are then open to talking with me; and has been my personal hub around which I can consume, test and deliver appropriate web services. Here are a few of the suggestions I've come up with that are key in my view: 1) Ecommerce with digital delivery. I'm still stunned that this is so hard but I'm encouraged by offerings like MagentoCommerce (and hopefully they'll ship in Q1 like they say the will) and like what the Shopify guys have done. Pick one ecommerce direction (*must* have digital delivery) and deliver it as an add-on service for all Typepad and Movable Type users. The Paypal widget is a fine start, but why wouldn't SixApart want the upsell and fees associated with commerce transactions? For truly integrated ecommerce I'd pay ~$25-$100 per month (depends on features and storage) plus a transaction fee of ~2.5%. That seems like A LOT of money you're leaving on the table. 2) Add more templates (and cutting edge navigation...top nav would be a start with Suckerfish-like dropdowns for pages). By now there should be hundreds. I'm stunned by the cutting edge templates by such groups as Rockettheme.com and wonder why most Typepad ones are so pedestrian or even why Movable Type hosters offer better looking and more professional ones? There are so many serious professionals shoving their value-stake-in-the-ground with blogging that world-class look-n-feel is table stakes to be in the game and why I've deployed several "pro" sites in Wordpress and have someone working on Joomla 1.5. 3) How about more tools? Widget support is fine, but doing something as simple as placing an mp3 in a post and have Typepad automagically wrap it with the Flash player code doesn't seem too tough but it's not there (requires a snippet of HTML code that many can't figure out how to do). Same thing with video or flash embeds (you need players with great skins). Or, say, an Amazon S3 storage option for my OWN video, audio, and Flash containers that I can just point to and deliver through my blog. Analytics, SEO, understanding ones ranking and such are other key hot buttons (and people are stunned -- and overwhelmed -- when I show them all of the 3rd party tools I use) and now requires we bloggers to go elsewhere. All of that is lost revenue for you guys. 4) Integrated communications. SixApart could be a unifed communications hub around blogging by partnering. Again, back on the theme of blogging not being a diary but rather a "value container", I want it to be the hub of my communications. I build private blogs for clients, though I'm now doing that in Wordpress on my own servers (because I have more control and would have to hack the hell out of Typepad). Many others I've advised are doing the same. With Skypecasts, HighSpeedConferencing.com and Talkshoe being just a few of the audio conferencing providers out there, why not make it simple for your users to pull from a laundry list of video, audio, and web conferencing offerings? I'm sure companies would trip all over themselves to play with SixApart. 5) Publishing workflow and networks. When I think about the next step in blogging as low-barrier-to-entry publishing of value, I think about where I want to target and deliver content. I'd like to publish and pick which blogs a post ends up on (e.g., my main blog or a select number of my private client blogs?). Also, leveraging RSS in some new ways to deliver content to print, to RIA's or even control the syndication (though that last one is probably impossible). Other than that, I can't think of anything. ;-)