Apparently there was a big meeting of news executives today in Chicago under the auspices of the Newspaper Association of America. The de jure name for the topic at hand was “Models to Monetize Content” but the de facto subject of the conclave seems to be building paywalls and ending what James Warren glibly calls “the age of content theft.”

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Earlier this week the Open Source Applications Foundation–the organization developing Chandler, whose work I followed for three years and whose story I tell in “Dreaming in Code”–announced what it called a “restructuring,” which meant laying off roughly two-thirds of its employees.

So does this mean that Mitch Kapor, OSAF’s founder and chief funder, is “pulling the plug” on OSAF, as Techdirt has it, or “bailing on” Chandler, as a CNET blogger put it?

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I left Salon last summer with the idea of working on a new book. I’m happy to report that the book now has a deal and a publisher–Crown, with whom I had such a happy experience on “Dreaming in Code”–and I’ll be spending the next year or so researching and writing it.

I am, I think the word is, stoked.

The topic will seem obvious to any of you who’ve been reading my stuff over the years: It’s going to be a book about bloggers and blogging. The working title is SAY EVERYTHING, and we’re describing it as the story of how blogging began, what it’s becoming, and what it means for our culture.

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