It’s approaching two years since I left San Francisco, and this Saturday I’ll again set foot on Northern California soil. Together with one of my AFR colleagues, I’ll be attending the AlwaysOn Innovation Summit, and will be interviewing a number of really cool IT types while I’m there (I’ll keep that info under wraps for now…).

The best thing is that we are AFR-funded and completely free of vendor sponsorship. It’s something of a novelty in the junket-ridden Australian IT media business, and I can tell you it’s a great feeling.

So if you’re in the Bay Area between July 16 and 29, lemme know. I’m hoping to catch up with as many old friends as possible. And while we’re at it, let’s do an experiment in collaborative journalism - if you’re not going to AlwaysOn and have got burning questions for some of the people listed as attending, write it up in the comments below. No promises to deliver every question, but I’ll try.

The blog supporting News Ltd’s Alpha Magazine went live today. There is no mention on the site of it being a ‘blog,’ but it looks, smells and acts like a blog - comments, trackback, conversational posts, About links etc.

What’s missing, however, are any obvious RSS feeds. My bloglines RSS reader picked up a feed via the main URL, but there does not seem to be any clues for the non-RSS savvy - which probably constitute 98 percent of the local audience.

Also, this page gives you a clue to the business model. It’s as much about traditional newspaper circ. as it is about being a funky mag:

Alpha costs just $2 per issue when you buy your local News Ltd metropolitan newspaper.