Berkman Buzz: week of March 2

BERKMAN BUZZ: A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard Law School
Week of March 9, 2007

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

*Ethan Zuckerman shares some TED Conference finds.
*Dan Gillmor comments on traditional media's blogging.
*John Palfrey finds an "online marketplace for patents."
*Doc Searls defines "the Giant Zero."
*Wendy Seltzer talks C-Span and copyright.
*Global Voices details recent clamps on citizen journalism.

The full Buzz:

“[T]here are some really cool things you can do when a screen can detect multiple touch points. Han and Davidson start with a demo of 250 videos, the most popular videos on YouTube. With two hands, Han can zoom, rotate and pan each video. The huge size of the screen supports collaborative work - the boys throw videos from one person to another. …”
Ethan Zuckerman, “Multitouch Goes Widescreen”

“As traditional journalism organizations move onto the Web, they are learning to do more than re-publish the work they’ve printed or broadcast. The first forays into conversational journalism were blogs written by staff members, a genre now so widespread that it’s getting difficult to find a news organization without staff blogs. Less common, but becoming more so, is giving the audience an opportunity to comment on the journalism on the organization’s own website. …”
Dan Gillmor, “New Report Shows How News Orgs Encourage Audience Involvement”

“I got word today of the launch of a new service called LegalForce. They’re creating an online marketplace for patents. They’ve also got something of a community-building idea for stakeholders in the patenting system, it appears. It ’s a seed-funded company out of Palo Alto. They welcome inquiries from academics who wish to do research on their data set. …”
John Palfrey, “Launch of LegalForce, Creation of Markets for IP”

“"Content" is inert. It isn't alive. It doesn't grow, or catch fire, or go viral. Ideas and insights do that. Interesting facts do that. "Audiences" are passive. They sit still, clap and leave. That might be what happened with newspapers and radio and TV in the old MSM-controlled world, but it's not what happens on The Giant Zero. It's not what happens with blogging, or with citizen journalism. Here it's all about contribution, participation. It involves conversation, but it goes beyond that into relationship — with readers, with viewers, with the larger ecosystem by which we all inform each other. …”
Doc Searls, “The Giant Zero”

“As Speaker Pelosi's story indicates, whether or not C-SPAN has a copyright in the minimal creativity of positioning cameras before a government hearing, its copyright claims prevented some people from using the streams. That chill operates as a law in itself, reducing the discourse around political events from what it could be if people felt secure in their non-infringing use of videos. …”
Wendy Seltzer, “C-Span Gets Net-Savvy Copyright Policy”

“One has to wonder now what the next move by the French Republic, in its fervor to “prevent criminal behavior”, will be. Will it be the banning of video-sharing sites like YouTube and the France’s Dailymotion, which were widely used by young citizen journalists during the “émeutes de Paris” (Paris riots) two years ago? And will music videos like “Paris Brûle” (”Paris Is Burning” …) be forbidden in France? …”
Global Voices, “March of the Censors: France, Turkey and China Clamp Down on Freedom of Speech”