I’ve been getting a TON of speaking requests, including for places like India and Korea and Italy. Yikes. I could spend all my time speaking and no time doing my shows or building PodTech’s network.

Anyway, one that I’ll be at is the Blog Business Summit, in Seattle in October. That should be interesting this year cause there’s a LOT of new businesses blogging. Heck, just check out all the real estate agents getting into blogging lately, thanks to the Inman Real Estate newsletter, which Stan tells us is the one that agents follow most.

While I’m off the grid I’ll look at my calendar and make some decisions. Sorry if I haven’t gotten back to you yet. I’ve been VERY bad at answering email the past month. Naughty, naughty Scoble.

Anyway, I did set up a wiki for our off the grid campout. My mom’s house is totally full, but if you’re up in Montana next week, please do stop by. The beer is free. Just be warned that you might be videoblogged.

Brian Oberkirch talks about having one of his sites pulled down (an important one, too, on the New Orleans disaster) by an ex partner.

Oh, I hear ya on that one. Userland pulled down the first two years of my blog and never put it back up.

Breakage happens all the time. It’s unfortunate. But there are ways to route around the damage. Unfortunately they didn’t crawl everything.

A friend asked me why I don’t get mad about stuff like that. “I’m gonna end up in a box either way,” I answered.

Anyway, I’ll be offline until August 13th. Visit TechMeme, which is my favorite news site. Enjoy life.

MSNBC is reporting that AOL is laying off 5,000. Ouch. But we saw this coming, didn’t we?

One thing I watch closely is how people use computers. When I visited Montana and went into everyday people’s homes and saw that they were on broadband and used Google, that told me that things had totally changed. Not to mention the Wifi signs in restaurants in Montana. I grew used to them in Silicon Valley, but when things get outside the valley’s bubble then you know things have really changed.

On Friday evening or Saturday morning I expect we’ll be with the hoards of tourists looking at Old Faithful.

The fact that I’m looking at a Yahoo property instead of an AOL one tells you something.

I’m gonna go up to tourists with my videocamera and ask them about photo sites they use and see what I learn.

Old Faithful is the one place in the USA that I’ve been where you’ll see, in the parking lot, license plates from every state in the nation (no one lives there, it’s a totally tourist population).

Sorry to the AOL’ers who now have to find work. If they lived in Silicon Valley they’d be sucked into the infrastructure here cause lots of companies are hiring, but I imagine most of the AOL workers are tech support types and they won’t find lots of jobs available, I’m guessing.