Steve Ward, who’s published a series of important papers with Rachel Gibson on political participation and the Net, talked today about how he thought ICTs have changed the political process.  He describes a broadening of the field of active participants; an increase in available information about NGOs and candidates and the like (with no comment as to…

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Kris has just done a quite interesting presentation, here at the OII summer programme, about his research project re: weblogs and public access to information.  His project, at INCITE at the University of Surrey, is sponsored by Sapient Corporation, a Boston-based consultancy, much to their credit.  We’re talking about how to be properly skeptical when talking about…

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The Berkman Center is proud to be participating in the Oxford Internet Institute’s program for graduate students.  Among the attendees: Karen Coppock and Urs Gasser, affiliates of the Berkman Center.  Also in the group: a blogger, Kaye Trammell, who just posted about BloggerCon.

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I enjoyed, from abroad, reading my newsclips from the last few days.  There were three good ones: a clever NYT piece about the backtalk from audiences at conferences and in classrooms, which raises the tricky questions here; a nice commentary in CNET about the RSS 2.0 release via (cc) license and other matters along similar…

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Via my terrific brother, Quentin Palfrey, who knows a thing or two about discourse in politics: Joanna Weiss of the Boston Globe has a piece on blogs and politics this morning.  She notes: “…[A]s the presidential campaign gains speed, many politically oriented blogs are thick with news from the trail — and some people have set up…

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Today, as discussed elsewhere by Dave Winer and Dan Gillmor, UserLand Software is transferring all right, title and interest in the RSS 2.0 specification to the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School, and we are re-releasing it, verbatim, to the public via Creative Commons‘ Attribution/ShareAlike license.  We believe that this simple, elegant step is an important one toward eliminating…

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Ever wanted to know how to start your own blog radio operation?  Check out what Bob Doyle, with inspiration from Dave and others, has set up for Chris Lydon.

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The SCO deal with Microsoft is detailed in its most recent 10-Q.  Looks as though MSFT plus one other will spend $8.25 MM plus another up to $5 MM on SCO products, plus has the option to exercise warrants valued at $500,000 (according to a Black-Scholes calculation by SCO).  The MSFT deal seems to have…

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“Although we have always had a vibrant patent system, we’ve managed to strike a balance between the need to encourage innovation and the need to foster competition.  As Benjamin Day [founder of the New York Sun], Henry Ford, and Sam Walton might attest, American corporations have thrived on innovative ideas and new business methods, without…

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If you haven’t checked it out, there’s something cool happening at Chris Lydon’s blog — an increasingly serious series of audio blog entries.  Today’s is with Eugene Volokh, law professor extraordinaire, who says his group blog is “an ecletic dinner table conversation.”

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Whatever you might think about what should happen in the Democratic primary for President, you should check out the BlogforAmerica site run by the Howard Dean campaign.  Cool.  I’ll be interested to see how real this thing gets, or if it turns out to be just another venue for press release publication.

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Jam Today of yesterday has a nice follow-up piece regarding the question of when, precisely, a blog entry becomes “fixed” — one of the prerequisites in order for copyright to attach.  I could imagine a judge (or her law clerk) struggling with just the question raised.  The outcome, I’d think, would be that a finder of fact would determine that a…

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