Chris Sells and Larry O'Brien are both having a crisis of confidence over their role as authors or information providers in the new world of blogging, Google and RSS.  I think its a good time to look at what value they add and what's important in helping developers learn. Says Chris in Time For An Exciting Career In Electronics:

what I'm best at in the whole world has either become completely unnecessary or incredibly easy. The skill that I spent most of the last 10 years learning was to look at a group of types, APIs, reference docs, headers, source code, etc., distill it down to a set of architectural intensions and then to weave a story through the whole thing to make sense of it for developers that weren't able to glean the intensions themselves (most often because they had real jobs). I call this exhaustive search for intention officially at an end. I'm not longer needed except as a gatherer for those not yet facile in RSS aggregators (which, luckily for me, is still a large number : ).

And Larry in 'Being run over by the cluetrain':

With the whole gamut of Internet-based communication (Websites, newsgroups and mailing lists, Google, email, and blogs), the typical path between technical question and answer has become much more direct. ... Independent authors and teachers have traditionally exploited the very inefficiencies that are being paved over by these technologies. The community no longer has the same incentive to pay money for magazines, books, seminars, and mentoring / consulting: they get the same substance faster and cheaper, if perhaps not with the same style, context, and specificity.

The mistake being made here is to think that the value of authors is based around converying factual knowledge.  The advent of encylcopedias didn't reduce the need for teachers.  There's a big difference between transferring information and helping people learn.   I think it's a great thing that technical authors can now move up the tree away from technical answers and onto higher order tasks like helping people learn how to adapt to the new technologies (that seem to be changing every three years).

I also think both of these guys sell themselves short.  Even though Chris knows about the intentions behind the software, there's always a market for someone who can tell a story and transfer this information to others.  At the PDC, most of what Don had to say has been written somewhere else previously, but I'll still pay for the experience of hearing him tell the story.  Heck, I've read most of Chris' online articles, but I still paid for his latest book (I wanted the convenience of the book and I wanted to have him tell me the whole story about windows forms, not just part of it)

I'd  also say the valuable skill that Chris has is not his own deep knowledge of the intent behind APIs, but his ability to transfer this knowledge of the intent to me.  Larry's book has the right idea - 'Thinking in .NET', not 101 code examples.  I want these guys to help me think, and learn how to think about the problem, not just to find the answer.

What's clear to me, after 19 Microsoft Certified Professional exams (including sitting the core MCSD exam for the third time), is that knowledge expires fairly quickly, whereas knowing how to learn continues to pay back.  This is exactly what Chris has written about in Learning How To Learn.  I can't believe he thinks he'll be replaced just because some of the MS tech team are blogging themselves.   Maybe he just needs a hug.