I was going to do more blogging of this, but I mean really, what’s the point? (UPDATE: Jim Flowers is doing a great job as well…)

Suffice to say I wish I was back in college, I wish I was an intellectual, I wish I could do something like this on a regular basis, and I wish I was back in college…really. (Especially at Harvard.) These guys are pretty brilliant, great teachers, and do some good work with PowerPoint (as opposed to PowerPointLess.)

Here are just a couple of excerpts that I thought were blog relevant.

Yochai Benkler

Autonomy–The Internet architecture moves away from broadcast and telephony where everyone is a passive receiver of finished content to one where anyone can create his own information. Everyone is a pamphleteer. In order for information to be free, to be users instead of consumers, etc. we must have some substantial portion of the information environment that is free from the control of anyone.

Lawrence Lessig
Great ideas come from outside the core network owners. Most of the big innovations of the Internet age, Hotmail, ICQ, Napster, etc. were created by kids and/or non-Americans. Outsiders are the key to innovation.

And an article by Robert Boynton (who I’ve been schooling on RSS) from the NY Times magazine that covers a lot of the context for these discussions: The Tyranny of Copyright
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Lawrence Lessig, moving about the room in the middle of his first lecture, sees Dave Winer and says “Dave, you’re here! Are you blogging?” Dave says “Yes.” Lessig says “Cool!”
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(via J.D. Lasica) Great post by Kevin Drum (one of the first bloggers for hire) on what Weblogs do well. It does a good job of getting to the flexibility of the medium and points out some stark contrasts to print.

Blog posts can be any length. If a thought only deserves a couple of sentences, that’s what it gets. If it deserves a thousand words, it can get that too. When was the last time you saw a 200-word op-ed or a 20-minute segment on the evening news?

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Ok, so I’m sitting in the Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law getting ready for the I-Law conference and feeling pretty fortunate. Safe to say I’m going to be way in over my head, but if relevant, I’ll try to post some salient thoughts.

Last night on my 5 1/2 hour drive up here, I watched three of the hour or so long DVDs that were required viewing. (Not safe driving habits, I know, but when you’re going 85 mph, it’s probably not going to make much difference anyway. Some really heady stuff about the ways in which the Internet is evolving and the really critical juncture it seems to be at regarding freedom and privacy. I’m hoping there will be much food for thought…
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