I’m at the Plaza Hotel today (sans Charlie Sheen, unfortunately) attending the MarkLogic Digital Publishing Summit. As such, I spent my morning with what looks to be a few hundred people and Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired. For his part, Anderson explained his oh-so inflammatory “The Web is Dead” cover, and guided the audience through Wired’s approach to the iPad.

Anderson discussed the difference between designing a magazine (digital of print) and a website — talking about the constraints of a typical browser-based experience. Using Wired’s ad-supported site as an example he said, “This is the model that trained a generation to ignore the top and sides.” The inability to “control the experience” on the web — as Anderson put it — leads to less user engagement. Wired readers, he said, spend about an hour with the print magazine, slightly less than that on the iPhone, and about 100 minutes on the iPad — while web users are in and out in about three minutes. In many ways, these stats supported Anderson’s theory that the web is dead in terms of “the market for commercial content.”

Even with the success of Wired’s digital magazine, Anderson and his team still have questions. Are vertical stacks working? Is cached video better than streaming? What should the social media layer include? The questions keep coming, but a few intrepid companies are already in the process of hashing out those answers for the rest of us. Many of them, no doubt, will speak today.