My colleague Timo Hannay looks after Nature's blue-sky developments in technology and most of the blue skies are turning out be real.

He also contributes to the Nascent blog and yesterday he was hoping to get on a plane to San Francisco for a science Foo Camp. Foo is an abbreviation of Friends of O'Reilly. Tim O'Reilly founded O'Reilly Media, a hugely successful technology publisher. Tim is viewed as one of the most far-sighted publishers in the world and has forged close relations with the movers and shakers of the Web 2.0 generation. His Foo camps have become legendary events for open discussions among top practitioners in any number of fields. Nature is proud to have been working with O'Reilly and Google to organise a Science Foo Camp today and tomorrow at the famous Googleplex. There are 200 of the world's top scientists and knowledge engineers discussing the future. Goodness knows what will be the outcome but for sure it will be interesting and for sure Timo will write it up for us.

On a more parochial but interesting historical note, Matthias Mueller, a student in publishing studies at City University in London is writing a dissertation on the Net Book Agreement (whatever that is). He's asked me to encourage interested people to fill in his questionnaire which can be found on his blog.