Open Education(a grassroots organization advocating for open educational content - developed by individual educators or as part of a community of practice) recently interviewed Professor Lawrence Lessig from Stanford Law School. Professor Lessig is a recognized leader in cyberlaw, promoting a balance of fairness in content creation and public use - a vision often in conflict with large media/content corporations.
Lessig is shifting his attention away from the court and towards educating the public, which I believe is a very sound move.
"Losing in the court means that we have to do a lot more in the public space. We have to do a lot more work in convincing people of the importance of this. I’ve shifted a lot of my energies to Creative Commons, which is one place where we’ll try to do this. The real struggle now will be to make sure that we make a wide range of people aware of exactly what’s at stake, so that we can begin to build a political movement that gets reflected in the political process."
Most of this piece of advice is dedicated to the high art of pitching posts to other bloggers by private e-mail in order to get links. I can't tell you whether it works because I've never done it, but the tips make a lot of sense. An example:
Does your recipient often link to other bloggers, at least outside his circle of blogfriends? If he almost never does, don't waste his time unless you've got something extremely juicy.
This kind of lore has got to become increasingly useful in an ever more crowded blog environment. (I'm happy I didn't get started just this spring, among the likes of Esther Dyson and eBay founder Pierre Omidyar...)
It is also a good idea to consider doing pitches publicly, in the form of relevant comments to posts on a more popular blog.
MORE THAN PERSONAL: THE IMPACT OF WEBLOGS Quote: "Weblogs were like a direct channel into the heart of a discipline, expressed with the authority of those deeply involved in its inner workings." Comment: This article does a quick, effective run through blogging, covering how they started, their original use, RSS, and their role in education. "The next educational use of blogs will be for the distribution of learning content. Blogs form an ideal medium for the distribution of professional development and other learning resources." Extensive list of blogging related resources at the end of the article.
