Second of today’s Cal panels: Disrupting the News Industry
Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism. Panelists:
I attended two panel discussions this morning at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. This is the first-ever meeting of the fellows of the Western Knight Center for Specialized Journalism; today and tomorrow they will continue as a conference on China’s digital future.
First, this morning, Revisiting Virtual Communities: The Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics. Panelists:
Cecil put his moneymaker where his If Jesus were an a capella song about himself, I’d like to think this is the song he’d be is.
I’m blogging tonight’s Berkeley panel (by Jove, Paul Grabowicz has done it again!) over at The Power of Many and I’ve posted a bunch of my usual blurry photos as well.
![[Caruso and Kurzweil]](https://i0.wp.com/x-pollen.com/many/seen/telekurzweil.gif)
I’m blogging this from Living With The Genie: On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, an exciting star-studded, deep-thinky conversation introduced by Michael Pollan, moderated by Christina Desser, co-editor of the Living with the Genie title that inspired the panel (idea for promoting this book in the fall or next spring?), and incorporating Denise Caruso, Mark Schapiro, and Ray Kurzweil (via 2D telepresence).
Met Justin Hall after reading his journalings since the mid ’90s.
Shacker is webcasting.
Spoke briefly with J.D. Lasica (been working on his Dark Net book) and Scott Rosenberg (working on his philosophy of programming/software book?), and am keeping an eye out for Mary Hodder.
Who’s for dinner afterward?
Howard Rheingold, admits to an enlightenment-era bias
Richard Schapiro is pointing out that the laws governing the technology of shipping were established in the 18th century.
I know this is random.
I am posting pictures via TypePad. They should soon show up at Mr. Spontaneous.
Richard Rhodes couldn’t make it for personal reasons.
What I really want to know is this: Is this Churchbells Softly Chime remix (about 7 megs as MP3 – it was closer to 50 megs as an AIF) an improvement over the previous take or not?
Lawrence Lessig is well known for making the argument that looser copyright laws allow for a huge amount of derived creativity, and that this, in turn, earns more money and fame for the original works. He has once again put his money where his mouth is by making his latest book available for free. He’s hardly the first (or even most successful) author to give his book away for free electronically, but today’s New York Times: Practicing the Liberty He Preaches reports (links added):
Lawrence Lessig wants to make intellectual property more widely available. So he has decided to offer some of his own at no charge.
His new book, “Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity,” is available online, free. But a bound version from Penguin Press costs $24.95 (list).
Since the book’s publication on March 25, 21 editions of the free digital version have been created. Among them are two volunteer efforts: a collective project in streaming audio (akma.disseminary.org/archives/001253.html) and another in HTML (www.easylum.net/book/view/12), with handy links that explain details in the text like who Ub Iwerks was (a master animation artist for Walt Disney). …
Mr. Lessig said he was gratified that remixes of his book had popped up (free-culture.org/remixes), although it took some getting used to. “I confess when it first happened, I had to take a deep breath and reconvince myself of the principles here,” he said.
The book is available under a Creative Commons license and can be downloaded in PDF format from the book’s site, FreeCulture.org, or from LegalTorrents.com. (The NYT article says it can also be downloaded from Amazon.com, but I can’t see how.) (Hat tip to Rachel Boyce.)
Sébastien Paquet has a wiki-enabled page to list sites and blogs and such doing research on social software. He also has “a wiki page
to help find a promising strategy for enabling a self-organizing directory of research weblogs.”
not another blog! 