Apologies for letting the blog languish. In the immortal words of many a scribbler, life has trumped blogging lately.

It’s ironic. I spend a lot of time and energy flying around the world talking about new forms of collaboration, but one would think those forms would actually allow me to fly less and not more. But every talk seems to turn into three more talks, and everyone wants to meet in person. Highlights of the year so far include the amazing bunch at CC Korea and the burgeoning connections we’re creating with folks in the US national cancer grid – they’re doing good work there, with some real progress.

This all comes at a cost. I’ve flown 110,000 miles already this year for work – add another 30,000 to cover personal flights to Brazil (my fiancee is from Sao Paulo) – and it just seems to get worse. For the most part we’ve shut down big work travel til September but then it’s back down in the hole until December, with trips coming up to Cuba, Australia, Japan, Colombia, Scotland, and various domestic destinations.

The road is a great place in many ways. It’s where the collaborations actually take form, where the ideas bounce and reverberate. Blogs are great, as are online videos in lieu of speaking engagements. But until we can cross the uncanny valley the big collaborations still seem to be face-time driven, rather than facebook driven.

There’s a stored body of post ideas, including: why journals as we know them aren’t going anywhere in the short term, elsevier’s grand challenge, chris anderson’s (ill-advised, i think) comments on the scientific method, the relationship of access cultures to innovation cultures, and more. Hopefully the coming weeks of downtime will be rich for the blog. Email me if I owe you a response to anything!