I had a busy day in Sydney visiting with our dynamic image team. Our image business had a good year in 2006 and 2007 is looking promising down under. We are scoring well with the editorial side of images in Australia and have added some native Australian RF images that make us appealing to commercial image buyers. Jupiterimages in Australia offers a great lineup of imagery for this market.

I try to get to Sydney every six months. It is a long way to travel but I feel it important to visit with all of our employees as often as possible. Even a few solid hours can lead to invaluable dialogue with colleagues which cannot be achieved via email and telephone.

One bummer today was the worldwide BlackBerry outage. I stopped getting email earlier in the day and then found out that RIM was having prolems worldwide. It is amazing how much one can get addicted to a Blackberry and almost continuous email.

I have been a world traveler for 30 years or more and a day like today reminds me of pre-Internet days when communication back to the home office was perhaps one end of the day phone call.

Another thought today is about newspaper size - something I have mentioned many times in this space. Reading the Asian edition of the Wall Street Journal leads me to believe that in the next 10 years the USA edition of the WSJ might be a small tabloid and about 32 pages. Perhaps this will be only 5 years out?

I also find it interesting to read about the DoubleClick deal with Google. It will be interesting to see how Google uses DoubleClick. Many are worried about some type of advertising delivery monopoly here. I tend to think that there will be many more iterations of ad delivery in coming years that what we have today will not be the norm in coming years. I believe there is still opportunity for new ways of delivering ads and that we do not need to fear a Google monopoly. Most likely this puts me in the minority.