I'm not quite sure I understand how feeling that the Emerging Technologies conference isn't as immediately practical as our books translates to agreeing with Orlowski that we excluded a speaker on the grounds of his technical politics.

Interestingly enough, many of the things that you seem to find uninteresting -- peer to peer, web services, bioinformatics, distributed computation -- are in fact continuing to grow in importance.

The whole point of the Emerging Technologies conference is to give us a forum for treating new topics earlier in their lifecycle, before they are jelled enough to earn their O'Reilly book.