Berkman Buzz: Week of October 26, 2009

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
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What's being discussed...take your pick or browse below.

* Doc Searls is back in Wittenberg, taking the long view.
* David Weinberger tries to blog the conversation around Elizabeth Goodman's thoughts on walled gardens.
* New on Publius: "Metaphors We Regulate By," by Rikke Frank Jørgensen
* Having been bitten by brevity, Ethan Zuckerman opts for expostulation with limbs and outward flourishes.
* StopBadware corrects the record.
* Internet & Democracy comments on some news from the US Treasury.
* John Palfrey reviews Dawn Nunziato's "Virtual Freedom."
* Dan Gillmor critiques McChesney and Nichols.
* CMLP explores politicians, social media, and the law.
* Donnie Dong distills the 2009 Free Culture Research Workshop.
* Weekly Global Voices: "Hong Kong: Property market bubbles bursted into public outrage"
* Micro-post of the week: danah boyd grateful for comments

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The full buzz.

"The older I get, the earlier it seems. It’s funny that we chose 95 theses because the worked for Luther, but basically that’s why. (We called it a manifesto because that worked for Marx. Karl, not Groucho, though the latter was much funnier. I also went to a Lutheran high school. Coincidence?) I don’t think any of us was taking the long-term perspective, though. We just wanted to say what we thought was true and nobody else seemed to be talking about. But I’m thinking now that it will take many more years. Perhaps decades, before some of what we said will sink in the rest of the way."
From Doc Searls' blog post Cluetrainings

"Elizabeth Goodman of UC Berkeley is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on a project she’s just now beginning. It is, she says, “half-baked.” She’s going to compare walled gardens in the computer sense to the original referent of “walled garden” and experiences of community gardens which often are fenced off. She says she comes to this from a design background, and has been looking at “how the metaphors we use shape the possibilities we imagine for them and how people can act in them.”"
From David Weinberger's blog post [Berkman] Elizabeth Goodman on walled gardens

"Many of the celebrated possibilities of the Internet, such as the empowerment of civil society and the advancement of human rights, are presumably linked to the Net’s public features, which potentially foster increased access to information and new means for contributing to the public domain of knowledge. It therefore becomes crucial how the Internet, or various domains of the Internet, are framed and regulated as public and private spheres. Unpacking the relationship between conceptual framings and policy choices is central for scholarly as well as policy debates regarding how Internet may best serve civil society."
From Rikke Frank Jørgensen's essay for Publius, Metaphors We Regulate By

"What this meant was that Rachel and I traded off speakers, usually using the downtime to finish notes from the previous session. But it also meant that I could tweet while Rachel was blogging a speaker, not trying to summarize the talks, but amplifying key phrases. (Jen Brea and I did this together at an academic event at Berkman, and it worked nicely.) It was going pretty smoothly until Michael Pollan got on stage. I like Pollan. I liked “The Botany of Desire” a good deal, and I’ve got sympathies for his point of view on food production. Rachel and I have belonged to a CSA for almost two decades, we can and pickle and freeze and eat local meat… We’re more or less on his side, but I haven’t really felt compelled to read or listen to him lately, as I’m not planning on making any major changes to my cooking and eating behaviors. Listening to him present at Pop!Tech, I was mostly impressed by his command of the sound bite. He’s an excellent writer, and many of the points he’s making fit neatly into 140 characters or less..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blog post Beware the sound bite

"It was reported today that a website of the official newspaper of the Chinese government, The People’s Daily, was flagged for malware by Google. The paper apparently complained that Google was maliciously flagging the site due to the paper’s criticism of Google Library. Google China denied the allegation, pointing out that the site was flagged by automated anti-malware systems, not based on content."
From Maxim Weinstein's blog post for StopBadware, Prominent Chinese site flagged for badware

"Arguing that access to the flow of information on the Internet in Iran and Cuba is in line with US interests, the US Treasury has asked Google and Microsoft to give users in those two countries access to their chat services. This is a smart move, but just the beginning of what should be done to increase the flow on online speech in those countries."
From Bruce Etling's blog post for Internet & Democracy, US Loosens Internet Restrictions on Iran and Cuba

"Dawn Nunziato, a law prof at George Washington University Law School, has written a helpful and interesting new book, entitled Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age. Her focus in “Virtual Freedom” is — as the subtitle suggests — free speech on the net, framed primarily for the current net neutrality debate. She compares two distinct conceptions of the First Amendment, one affirmative and the other negative. She argues forcefully for the affirmative approach to the First Amendment."
From John Palfrey's blog post Dawn Nunziato’s Virtual Freedom: Net Neutrality and Free Speech in the Internet Age

"If the authors had only pursued their logic, they’d have ended up at the only sensible conclusion — that taxpayers could well subsidize the equivalent of the postal and printing subsidies they celebrate (among many other infrastructure supports that helped get the news from one place to another, such as roads, never mind the variety of other government help that’s gone to news organizations over the past several centuries."
From Dan Gillmor's blog post The Only ‘Journalism’ Subsidy We Need is in Bandwidth

"As social media become more popular, it is inevitable that enterprising politicians will use it promote themselves, connect with constituents, and garner votes. The White House has a blog, several Senators and House members tweet, and elected officials and candidates at all levels of government are using social media to get out their messages. But just as use of social media by voters is coming into conflict with existing election laws, some politicians are discovering that their use of social media may clash — or at least create possible problems — with existing campaign and government disclosure laws."
From Eric Robinson's blog post for the CMLP, As Politicians Adopt Social Media, They Bump Into the Law

"Oct 23 2009, Harvard Law School Hauser Hall 104, Free Culture Research Workshop 09. It is the first Berkman formal event I participated since I arrvied in Boston on 20 Oct. Here are some key sentences at the conference. Terry Fisher: (quotes Walt Whitman's Song of Myself) "Both in and out of the game, watching and wondering at it." [Note: This can be an excellent overall brief to the conference]"
From Donnie Dong's blog post Key Sentences at 2009 Free Culture Research Workshop

"Earlier in October, an apartment in Hong Kong was sold for USD$57 million, a recording breaking price, locally and globally. The 6,158 square foot duplex apartment is in a building called “Conduit Road 39″ located at the western mid-levels of Hong Kong Island. The unidentified buyer is from Mainland China. Record breaking price in time of recession. At the same time, Hong Kong has become the number one in the income disparity list. As the property market keeps rising in time of recession due to the inflow of hot money, the dream of sweet home is getting further and further away from ordinary people..."
From Oiwan Lam's blog post for Global Voices, Hong Kong: Property market bubbles bursted into public outrage

"Commenters have added tremendous insight into my Facebook Status Updates vs. Twitter post: http://bit.ly/17OIQI If that's you, THANK YOU!" [8:06 AM Oct 28th]
danah boyd expresses her appreciation.