Kevin Kelly and blogging into books

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Yesterday, I was tracking down Kevin Kelly's (of Wired Magazine) Ted Talk "Next 5,000 Days on the Web" which is a fantastic resource I discovered last semester.  I will be using it in my Planning, Technology, and School Improvement course.  It really helped to get students' brains around this thing called the World Wide Web. 

In the process of going to his website (http://www.kk.org/) I discovered that he is writing his current book through his blog.  This activity is unfolding at http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/.  With 3,000 plus readers (of which, since yesterday, I am one), he has an expert group of reviewers.  He writes about the process of writing a book in this manner. 

The notion of writing a blog that then becomes a book is one that seems to be coming of age.  I discovered the VirtualDayz website through finding a book of the same name, self-published, on Amazon.com.  It was a unique volume on memory work and social media, culled from the blog entries of Elayne Zalis.

I thought about the projects that I am working on now and how blogging may be an interpretive step--part of the intermediate papers/memos--that would be part of creating a firmer or 'fixed' piece on what I learned.  Working in this way has a lot of similarity to doing a presentation at a conference on something that you are in the midst of analyzing...and yet what is also interesting to me is that you could do small components...smaller than what you would bring to a conference...and use them as building blocks for larger or more finished pieces. 

Hmm...another thing to think more about.