Berkman Buzz, week of July 30

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Week of July 30, 2007

What's going on... take your pick or browse below.

*Ethan Zuckerman offers advice for live blogging.
*Derek Slater criticizes the pressure to combat file sharing.
*Rebecca MacKinnon looks at new developments in the blogger arrest.
*William McGeveran discovers a law school lesson in Harry Potter.
*Urs Gasser raises new questions for a world of digital natives.
*Citizen Media Law Project: Bloggers Are Not Journalists, Illinois Juvenile Court Judge Declares.
*Weekly Global Voice: Japan: A Historic Election Defeat.

The full buzz.

“When I was about seven years old, my father taught me how to score a baseball game. We were probably in Florida, combining a trip to a spring training game with a visit to one of my grandmothers. He explained the basics of the hieroglyphic system that both professionals and fans use to score games, the numbering of the position players, the difference between a forward and backwards ‘K’, and set me loose to scribble on a scorecard while he made his own illegible notes in his wire-bound, leatherette scorer’s book.”
Ethan Zuckerman, “The 5-4-3 double play, or ‘The Art of Conference Blogging’”

“Last week, Sen. Harry Reid proposed and then withdrew dangerous legislation that threatened to make universities do the entertainment industry’s dirty work and use ineffective, burdensome copyright filtering tools on their networks. The Higher Education Reauthorization Act has now passed the Senate without that language. Thanks to everyone who took the time to call their Senators over the last day.  We won this battle in Congress, but we’re not out of the woods yet.”
Derek Slater, “Legislative Shot Across Colleges’ Bow Over P2P”

“More documents have surfaced showing that Yahoo! employees knew that they were handling political cases when they received information requests from Chinese authorities on at least two people now doing serious jail time.  This is contrary to previous claims by Yahoo! that 'we had no information about the nature of the investigation.'  Note that Yahoo! insists that it is wrong to say they were lying, in spite of that statement made to Congress last year which makes it seem like they were.”
Rebecca MacKinnon, “More Yahoo! China documents emerge”

“Don’t worry, no spoilers here.  I stayed up way past my bedtime last night finishing the final Harry Potter book. I found it very satisfying. But this is a law blog, and I am a geeky law professor, so the phenomenon I will note is how extensively these books develop the theme of procedural fairness — a marvelous lesson for the children who are its target audience.”
William McGeveran, “Harry Potter and the Due Process Clause”

“Today in Hong Kong, I’ve had the pleasure to catch up with some of my colleagues and friends who are living and working in Asia. The conversation with Rebecca MacKinnon, my former Berkman fellow Fellow and now assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Center, resonates in particular. We touched upon several themes and topics in which we share an interest, ranging from Chinese culture, U.S. foreign politics, to corporate social responsibility, among many others. We then started talking about the digital natives project(s), and youth and new media research questions (Rebecca actually teaches 'new media' at HKU).”
Urs Gasser, “Hong Kong Conversations: Digital Natives, Media Literacy, Rights and Responsibilities” 

“An Illinois juvenile court judge refused to allow blogger Elaine Hopkins from Peoriastory.com to observe and cover a July 25 juvenile court hearing in Peoria, IL. In excluding Hopkins from the courtroom, Judge Albert Purham, Jr. ruled that bloggers are not journalists under Illinois law.”
David Ardia, “Bloggers Are Not Journalists, Illinois Juvenile Court Judge Declares”

“Did the overwhelming defeat of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) in Japan’s upper house elections signal a wind of change sweeping through the Japanese political landscape, a groundswell of support for the opposition Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), or was it simply a long-overdue rejection of 'business as usual'? As the election came to a close on Sunday night and early results started to appear, there were no lack of interpretations offered to explain what had been widely predicted beforehand.”
Chris Salzberg, “Japan: A Historic Election Defeat”