This weekend, only six weeks after hitting 8000 subscribers to our email delivery, we hit 8500. Welcome to all our new readers, enjoy the show!

I'm juggling about a dozen invites for speaking at various venues and dates this year. That would be have been very exciting six months ago, but now that I have a day job finding the time to travel (even when I'm being paid to do so) is much more difficult. It means taking vacation days away from my family. So I'll probably only do three or four.

And the first one has been decided - on October 6th I'll be giving the banquet speach at the Ohio Library Council's annual conference in Columbus, OH. Now it just remains to be seen if Gene "fear of flying" Ambaum will be joining me.

Don't let this stop you from inviting us to come speak. It may be that the timing or location of your gathering may work out better for us. And 2006 is wide open. If you're a company another interesting possibility is sponsoring a talk by us at ALA or one of the other big library conferences we tend to have a booth at. After all, we're already there. Drop us a line.