In a few hours I'll be on a plane to Seattle, for the Microsoft Search Champs V4. My second trip to the US and my first to Seattle. It'll be 15.5 hours of flying time from New Zealand (not including waiting around for connecting flights etc), but luckily for me I'm flying business class - another first :-)

I'm honoured to be invited by Microsoft and I'm really looking forward to seeing the Redmond campus. A slice of Microserfs for this kiwi :-) I hope my feedback on their upcoming web-based products proves useful, to repay them for this exciting trip.

I'm looking forward to meeting lots of new people at Search Champs, plus I'll be catching up with a good number of the Web 2.0 Workgroup. Also there are some Seattle folks whose blogs I've been following for a long time, like Erik Benson and his Robot Co-op colleagues and Jay Feinberg. So I'm hoping to get a chance to meet them.

The famed Seattle Public library, built by leading architect Rem Koolhaas, is high on my list of things to see. As it is for Fred and others. The pic below from Flickr is from Niall Kennedy, taken during a Gnomedex party at the library.

No doubt I'll be taking lots of my own photos during my time there!

Next time I post to this blog, I'll be over in Seattle. In the meantime I'll leave you with a few good links, seeing as I'll be in mid-air when the next Daily is due ;-)

- The Web Is the Platform (good dev-focused article from Application Development Trend magazine - via John Musser)

- How Do You Become An Industry Analyst? (two-part series by James Governor of Redmonk. I think I'm probably a good example of a blogger turned career industry analyst...)

- Millennials & media (NYTimes article about kids born between 1980 and 2000 and their media habits)