This morning, we’ve had two unconference sessions, here at the Berkman tenth anniversary conference. And I have to say, as far as I can tell, it’s going really well. The participants (formerly known as attendees) filled in the grid of times and places with a set of great topics, ranging pretty far and quite wide. The people I’ve talked with so far have been enthusiastic about the sessions they went to.

I participated in one on reframing the Net. The discussion was interesting, with some particular insights. The next one was smaller, more like eight people sitting around the table, except four of the people were Charlie Nesson, David Reed, and Jordan Pollack, and Stuart Shieber. The topic had something to do with entropy in information theory and thermodynamics; complexity; the ontological status of math; and the beauty of numbers. It was, well, something. Fantastic. My brow may never unfurrow as I try to understand the implications of that discussion.

Now Josh Marshall is addressing the lunch about how the Net is bringing about the crumbling of the paper news empire. “These things tend to work out well over the fifty year timeline, but in the short term the human cost — and the journalistic cost — is awful.”

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