Berkman@10: The Berkman Center Celebrates its 10th Year as a Research Center at Harvard Law School

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is now home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace, technology, and society.

Through research, events, and discussion, Berkman@10 considers "The Future of the Internet" - to celebrate the work we have done together over the past decade, and to look ahead to what we hope to accomplish collectively in the next.
If you would like to make a comment on this "birthday" go to Palfrey's special page!

Breaking Down Digital Barriers:

International Study Examines the Issue of Interoperability Innovation, consumer choice and competition most important considerations Private sector well-suited to lead interoperability efforts

WASHINGTON, DC -- The findings of an international study released today by researchers from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and the Research Center for Information Law, University of St. Gallen indicate that private sector leadership, more so than government intervention, is the optimal method for ensuring that technologies work well together and innovation flourishes. The authors of "Breaking Down Digital Barriers: When and How ICT Interoperability Drives Innovation" found that interoperability is generally good for consumers and drives innovation, but determined that there is no "silver bullet" solution to the issue. Interoperability has increasingly become more important because computer users -- whether they be consumers, businesses, or governments -- now tend to obtain hardware and software from different vendors and expect everything to work together. One approach to the issue that has received attention advocates government-mandated adoption of specific technologies to compel interoperability.
This study suggests that such approaches are unlikely to be the optimal approach to interoperability. "Interoperability leads to innovation and many benefits for consumers," said co-principal investigator John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. "The case studies we investigated produced clear conclusions: The ICT industry is achieving considerable interoperability every day in response to the needs of customers. There is often more than one way to achieve interoperability. Market-driven initiatives tend to provide the most long-term promise." "This research demonstrates that there is no standard application to achieve ICT interoperability," said Urs Gasser, co-principal investigator and Director of the Research Center for Information Law. "Attempting to impose universal answers can produce unintended consequences such as curtailing innovation, limiting consumer choice and reducing competition. Instead, each situation needs to be analyzed on its own, to determine the best way to achieve interoperability. Nor can we forget that interoperability is simply a means to larger and more important goals, such as consumer choice, access to content, ease of use and diversity."

The key findings

The research focused on three case studies in which the issues of interoperability and innovation are uppermost: digital rights management in online and offline music distribution models; various models of digital identity systems (how computing systems identify users to provide the correct level of access and security); and web services (in which computer applications or programs connect with each other over the Internet to provide specific services to customers).

The core finding is that "increased levels of ICT interoperability generally foster innovation. But interoperability also contributes to other socially desirable outcomes. In our three case studies, we have studied its positive impact on consumer choice, ease of use, access to content, and diversity, among other things."

The investigation reached other, more nuanced conclusions:
* Interoperability does not mean the same thing in every context and as such, is not always good for everyone all the time. For example, if one wants completely secure software, then that software should probably have limited interoperability. In other words, there is no one-size-fits-all way to achieve interoperability in the ICT context.
* Interoperability can be achieved by multiple means including the licensing of intellectual property, product design, collaboration with partners, development of standards and governmental intervention. The easiest way to make a product from one company work well with a product from another company, for instance, may be for the companies to cross license their technologies. But in a different situation, another approach (collaboration or open standards) may be more effective and efficient.
* The best path to interoperability depends greatly upon context and which subsidiary goals matter most, such as prompting further innovation, providing consumer choice or ease of use, and the spurring of competition in the field.
* The private sector generally should lead interoperability efforts. The public sector should stand by either to lend a supportive hand or to determine if its involvement is warranted.

Recommendations

The authors of the study propose a process constructed around a set of guidelines to help businesses and governments determine the best way to achieve interoperability in a given situation. This approach may have policy implications for governments.
* Identify what the actual end goal or goals are. The goal is not interoperability per se, but rather something to which interoperability can lead, such as innovation or consumer choice.
* Consider the facts of the situation. The key variables that should be considered include time, maturity of the relevant technologies and markets and user practices and norms.
* In light of these goals and facts of the situation, consider possible options against the benchmarks proposed by the study: effectiveness, efficiency and flexibility.
* Remain open to the possibility of one or more approaches to interoperability, which may also be combined with one another to accomplish interoperability that drives innovation.
* In some instances, it may be possible to convene all relevant stakeholders to participate in a collaborative, open standards process. In other instances, the relevant facts may suggest that a single firm can drive innovation by offering to others the chance to collaborate through an open API, such as Facebook?s recent success in permitting third-party applications to run on its platform. But long-term sustainability may be an issue where a single firm makes an open API available according to a contract that it can change at any time.
* In the vast majority of cases, the private sector can and does accomplish a high level of interoperability on its own. The state may help by playing a convening role, or even in mandating a standard on which there is widespread agreement within industry after a collaborative process. The state may need to play a role after the fact to ensure that market actors do not abuse their positions.

The report and case studies can be downloaded at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interop.

The research was sponsored by Microsoft Corporation. ### The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is now home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace, technology, and society. More information can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.

The Research Center for Information Law, FIR-HSG, was established in 2000 by University of St. Gallen professors Jean Nicolas Druey, Herbert Burkert, and Rainer J. Schweizer. The research initiatives of the Center are aimed at analyzing and assessing legal frameworks and provisions that are regulating the creation, distribution, access, and usage of information in a given social subsystem such as the economic, cultural or political system; exploring the dynamic changes in information technologies and their impacts on the legal system. More information can be found at http://www.fir.unisg.ch/.

THE FUTURE of the INTERNET

Oxford Internet Institute - People - Faculty - Professor Jonathan Zittrain
The Center for Internet and Society (CIS) and
The Stanford Law and Technology Association (SLATA)
present
The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It
with
Professor Jonathan Zittrain
Monday October 22, 2007
12:45-2:00
Room 280B
Free and Open to the public (no rsvp required)
http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5563

The Internet we know and love at risk even as its freedoms are at a high water mark and rising. It's the changing slope of the curve that counts. Regulators and some business types (e.g., incumbents)have interest in being able to intervene more readily; they've been stymied since the 1990's because the Net has produced too many golden eggs to be worth shutting it down. The deciding vote is the "consumer" vote, and they want their MTV. Unfortunately that vote is itself shifting, in part because of the uncontrolled environment represented by Net and PC: too much spyware, too many viruses, too little reliability for the applications they want to use. Waiting in the wings is a new generation of "information appliances" that in the past have been laughable (think WebTV) but now are killer: iPod, XBox, TiVo, most mobile phones, Zune, PSP. These appliances, and a general appliancization of the PC itself, represent a very different environment: the immutability of an appliance to the consumer and third parties (think television set), coupled with use of the latest Net innovations to make the thing eminently alterable by (and only by) its maker and licensees. This talk maps out the bad implications of an appliancized -- and Web 2.0 -- world, and offers suggestions to temper it.

Jonathan Zittrain has recently co-authored Access Denied, a study of Internet filtering by national governments, and his book, The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It, will be released by Yale University Press and Penguin UK this winter. Papers may be found at http://www.jz.org.

GELMAN APPOINTED EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR of STANFORD'S C.I.S

Lauren Gelman Appointed Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society

Source: Stanford Law School
STANFORD, Calif., Sept. 20, 2007-- Lauren Gelman has been appointed executive director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society (CIS), a public interest technology law and policy program that brings together scholars, legislators, students, programmers,and scientists to study the interaction of new technologies and the law and to examine how the synergy between the two can promote or harm public goods like free speech, privacy, public commons,diversity, and scientific inquiry.
Gelman previously was associate director of CIS. Prior to joining Stanford, Gelman was corporate counsel for Real Names Corporation. She also spent six years in Washington, D.C. as the public policy director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and as the associate director of public policy for Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the world's largest association of computer scientists. Gelman's predecessor, Jennifer Granick, is now civil liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and will continue at Stanford Law as a lecturer in law this fall.
"CIS represents real people in real projects that are changing the law," says Gelman, whose current research focuses on the legal implications of technologies like collaborative publishing and social networking tools, virtual worlds, and municipal wireless networks, that increase opportunities for personal expression. "I'm excited tobe taking the helm at this exciting time, when the potential of democratizing technologies is greater than ever."
Gelman's appointment comes during a period of intense activity for CIS. In September, CIS and Stanford Law's Cyberlaw Clinic scored a win in the Tenth Circuit when they successfully argued that the Copyright Term Extension Act and Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act ran a foul of their clients' First Amendment rights.Additionally, one of CIS's most recent initiatives, the Fair UseProject (FUP), this past year settled a copyright case against the Estate of James Joyce; won the dismissal of a copyright infringement action brought against a prominent electronic musician; and formed a partnership to provide legal support for documentary film makers.
Gelman's litigation achievements at CIS include her authorship of anamicus brief in Apple v. Does, where she represented bloggers in a case that resulted in a landmark decision granting blogs and online news sites the same legal protections as traditional media outlets inprotecting confidential sources. This year she represented Wired News in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Bureau of Customsand Border Protection that forced the agency to turn over documentsabout a security breach in border screening computers.
In addition to her work at CIS, Gelman teaches a course at Stanford Law School on Internet privacy, and has served on a variety of outside boards and committees, including the board of the non profit advocacy group Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and the U.S. Transportation Security Administration's Secure Flight Working Group, which examined the privacy implications of the government's airline passenger screening program. She is also the dean and co-founder of the State of Play Academy (SOPA), an experimental online legal education program run by New York Law School that offers free classes in an immersive virtual world.
In her new role as executive director, Gelman will continue to expand CIS's litigation and advocacy efforts around free speech, innovation,security, and privacy. Specific issues the center plans to address this year include online participation in election campaigns; the relationship between courts and societies via virtual worlds; and launching a consumer privacy project.
"I'm thrilled to be working with Lauren, who brings considerable leadership and expertise to the position, and I look forward to continuing our work fostering laws and policies around technology that further democratic values," said Lawrence Lessig, director of CIS and Stanford Law professor.
CIS will continue to work on fair use cases and other collaborations with the Cyberlaw Clinic, which has moved under the umbrella of the Mills Legal Clinic of Stanford Law under the supervision of interim director and visiting professor of law Jennifer Urban. Urban comes to Stanford from USC, where she is clinical associate professor of law and director of the USC Intellectual Property and Technology Law Clinic.
About Stanford Law School.

Stanford Law School is one of the nation's leading institutions for legal scholarship and education. Its alumni are among the most influential decision makers in law, politics, business, and high technology. Faculty members argue before the Supreme Court, testify before Congress, and write books and articles for academic audiences, as well as the popular press. Along with offering traditional law school classes, the school has embraced new subjects and new ways ofteaching. The school's home page is located at http://www.law.stanford.edu/.

About the Center for Internet and Society

Founded by Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig in 2001, the Center for Internet and Society is a public interest technology law and policy program at Stanford Law School which engages students, academics, technologists and policy makers in exploring the interactions between technology, law, and society.

Media Contact: Amy Poftak

Assistant Director of Communications

Stanford Law School, 650.725.7516 poftak (at) law.stanford.edu

Lauren Gelman Executive Director Center for Internet and Society

Stanford Law School(ph) 650-724-3358

BERKMAN INVESTIGATES INTERNET & DEMOCRACY PROJECT TO FOCUS ON MIDDLE EAST and OTHER GLOBAL COMMUNITIES

Cambridge, MA – The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School announces the Internet and Democracy Project, an initiative that will examine how the Internet influences democratic norms and modes, including its impact on civil society, citizen media, government transparency, and the rule of law, with a focus on the Middle East. Through a grant of $1.5 million from the US Department of State’s Middle East Partnership Initiative, the Berkman Center will undertake the study over the next two years in collaboration with its extended community and institutional partners. As with all its projects, the Berkman Center retains complete independence in its research and other efforts under this grant. The goal of this work is to support the rights of citizens to access, develop and share independent sources of information, to advocate responsibly, to strengthen online networks, and to debate ideas freely with both civil society and government. These subjects will be examined through a series of case studies in which new technologies and online resources have influenced democracy and civic engagement. The project will include original research and the identification and development of innovative web-based tools that support the goals of the project. The team, led by Project Director Bruce Etling, will draw on communities from around the world, with a focus on the Middle East. “Around the world, citizens are using the Internet to affect democracies in intriguing and important ways,” said co-Principal Investigator John Palfrey, Executive Director of the Berkman Center. “But we don’t have a precise view of how this dynamic works. With the Middle East as our primary focus, our goal is to shed light on this phenomenon in constructive ways.”

“We want to help develop and test simple, lightweight tools for civic engagement online – tools that facilitate coordination among people who share a common cause, and good faith dialogue among people who disagree,” said co-Principal Investigator, Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center and Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University. This project is building on the experience of diverse Berkman Center initiatives aimed at examining the extent to which the Internet is fostering or undermining democratic institutions and processes around the world.

Through the generous support of other donors, the Berkman Center has undertaken projects that include: the H2O Project, which promotes the wide accessibility of academic discourse and teaching materials online; the Citizen Media Law Project, whose mission is to provide legal training and resources for individuals and organizations involved in citizen media as well as provide research and advocacy on free speech, newsgathering, intellectual property, and other legal issues related to citizen media, and; the OpenNet Initiative, which analyzes and documents Internet censorship and surveillance regimes worldwide, jointly with the University of Cambridge, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the University of Toronto.

###

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Founded in 1997, through a generous gift from Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman, the Center is now home to an ever-growing community of faculty, fellows, staff, and affiliates working on projects that span the broad range of intersections between cyberspace, technology, and society. More information can be found at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu.

About State of Play V

About State of Play V

Berkman Center Awarded Two Knight Grants for Media Projects

Success of "Global Voices" and "Potential of the Citizen Media Law Project" Recognized by Knight Foundation News Challenge

Cambridge, MA – The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School announced the award of two Knight Foundation News Challenge grants today – the only organization of the 24 winners to receive multiple grants – with both Global Voices and the Citizen Media Law Project acknowledged by the Knight Foundation at the Interactive Media Conference & Tradeshow in Miami.
“We are proud to receive these awards from the Knight Foundation, which not only help to affirm the importance of participatory media, but the need to articulate standards and level the playing field as citizen journalism quickly spreads across a largely unregulated space,” said Colin Maclay, Managing Director of the Berkman Center. Global Voices ( www.globalvoicesonline.org), a curator and aggregator of blogs from around the world, will receive $244,000 over two years to expand its coverage to underserved populations by training new authors in developing nations. Global Voices is an international effort to diversify the online conversation by showcasing speakers from around the world, and developing tools, institutions and relationships to help make these voices heard. Berkman Fellow and Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman thanked the Knight Foundation and praised their recognition of the value that international citizen journalism holds.
“Through all of the success that our project has experienced since it began in 2004, we have become more aware of the difficulties in creating a globally inclusive environment,” Zuckerman said. “We look forward to using this funding for the outreach, training, and technology vital to a more complete and dynamic international dialog,” he added. Global Voices was previously recognized by the Knight Foundation as the 2006 winner of the Knight-Batten award for innovations in journalism.
The project is sustained through foundation and corporate funding, including support from media company Reuters, the MacArthur Foundation, and Hivos, a Dutch foundation.The Citizen Media Law Project (CMLP, http://www.citmedialaw.org/) – a joint Berkman venture with the Center for Citizen Media – will receive a News Challenge award of $250,000 to support the first stage of the project, including conducting research and producing legal guides addressing legal issues faced by citizen journalists such as free speech, libel, newsgathering and intellectual property. The CMLP seeks to build a community of lawyers, academics, journalists, and others who are interested in facilitating citizen participation in online media and in protecting the legal rights of those engaged in speech on the Internet. Berkman Fellow and project director David Ardia noted: “We are excited to get started on what will be an important resource for citizen journalists.” “We are eager to see the CMLP become part of a wider effort to promote journalism generally and hope our work will help to ensure that our legal system fosters an environment suitable for open and robust speech,” he added. The emerging field of citizen media has been a major focus for the Berkman Center since 2003, when weblogging pioneer Dave Winer joined the center as a Berkman Fellow. Since that time, Berkman fellows have included citizen media luminaries such as Doc Searls, David Weinberger, CMLP co-founder Dan Gillmor and Global Voices co-founder Rebecca MacKinnon.
More: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu

THE BEST REVIEW ON THE LATEST YOUTUBE CASE IN TURKEY:

The ban on Turks by Turks - Turkish Daily News Mar 12, 2007
by Professor Haluk Şahin...

DURING THE LECTURE AT BILGI

...We spent highly nice time together with Semiha's students during the lecture today. Because of visiting almost all links that I inserted in my post here the time flied and we couldn't mention about "law"... (I will upload the rest of the material and they will read later on)...

At the end of the lecture they suddenly decided to start a blog for their class and they did it!
Using her own GMail e-mail account Melis created one and they gave their virtual pr company's name: Publica Iletisim. I hope this will be progressed by them soon.

From now on I will use my blogs as a presentation tool instead of "cornered" power point!

LECTURE ON "BLOGS & LAW" AT BILGI UNIVERSITY-I

“Blogs may enable academics to climb down from the ivory tower,

while bringing some of their purer air with them...”

Larry e. Ribstein

“Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship”,

April 27-28, 2006, held by Berkman Centre for Internet and Society,

Harvard University, Boston, USA

...The above quotation will be the introduction of my lecture that will be given to the students of my dear friend Semiha Baban who is an economist also holds an MPA from Harvard University and recently teaches public relations at the Faculty of Communication , Istanbul Bilgi University. In the meantime, I thought that making a presentation through one my weblogs would be more flexible and amusing comparing to powerpoint's molded templates...

In fact the debate whether the "Bloggership" transforms the legal scholarship that was started by Berkman Centre in the above Conference in last April has not ended. It has still been progressing through different platforms such as "The Future of Legal Scholarship" which was initiated by "The Pocket Part", so called as "a Companion to the Yale Law Journal" since the Conference ended. -If we could visit the latter during the lecture at Bilgi tomorrow, only this cartoon might have indicated us which wing of the ongoing debate is being owned by the Yale students who also are the editors of this brilliant publication: The Ribstein's view!

...Then, I will mention about the evolution of the blogs by taking the students to the following -linked- resources in order to show them they could start an academic publication similar to Yale's just by using blog software and techniques. Why not?...

Not only was it “cheap” and “instantaneous” but because of the ability of interaction with other converging information technologies, blogging also became one of the most attention-grabbing phenomena of the first decade of the 21st century.

... Before going further, referring to the three sorts of ICT literacies may be better (Computer, Digital and Information literacies)...

Although blogs started mostly in the form of personal web diaries and a great majority of them was interesting only for their owners, in time, they formed a great opportunity for “content creating and management”. Today from commercial business to NGOs, from individuals to state departments and head of nations, almost the whole world uses more or less the same blog technology in different ways, for different aims.

“The blogosphere”: All about blogs and blogging

Definitions: “Blogs” lack a single well-accepted definition as they are rapidly being transformed by the advancing information technology . Whilst academia and professionals have been developing taxonomy projects for this phenomenon since the 1990s, traditional dictionaries started to define blogging in their electronic version after 2000s.

Webster's New Millennium online dictionary gives the definition of the blog as follows

• an online diary; a personal chronological log of thoughts published on a Web page; also called Weblog, Web log
• to author an online diary or chronology of thoughts
• a personal Web site that provides updated headlines and news articles of other sites that are of interest to the user also may include journal entries, commentaries and recommendations compiled by the user.
  

Etymologically, “blog” is the short form of neologism “weblog” which consist of “web” and “log”. It was first coined by Jorn Barger in 1997. “Blog” has been chosen as “the top word of the year 2004” by Merriam-Webster, the US dictionary publisher that gives the definition of blog in online version as follows:

"A Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments,
and often hyperlinks provided by the writer".

The ongoing “Blogtalk - a European Weblog Conference” initiative owns Blood’s definition:
"What is a weblog? A weblog is a form and a format: a frequently updated website containing entries arranged in reverse-chronological order. But this simple form is infinitely malleable, and weblogs have huge potential for professional and private use. Easily maintained via computer or mobile devices, weblogs are organizing businesses, creating and strengthening social ties, filtering the World Wide Web, and providing a platform for ordinary people to publish their views to the world."

(See: Blood, R., "Weblogs: A History and Perspective", Rebecca's Pocket. 07 September 2000. 08 January 2006. http://www.rebeccablood.net/essays/weblog_history.html )
(See: BBC News, “Blog' picked as word of the year”, December 1, 2004. In the same news, a spokesman from“Oxford English Dictionary” said that the word “blog” has been already included into the printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary in 2003 and they were about to add “blogosphere” as well in 2004. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4059291.stm )

Facts and figures

According to the latest survey of David Sifry, the founder and the CEO of “Technorati” the “blogosphere” is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago. On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day. Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour and classify them through the 100 million author-created "tags". Today's "tagging" is a really important "categorization" work and quite different from yesterday's categorization concept! and Approximately 8% of the new are spam blogs (“splog”).

Evolution of the blogs

Dun Burstein takes the roots of blogging back to cave paintings of the Ice Age and finds similarities between the subjects of those engravings and today’s very first blog entries as part of a “conversation” which is stored and archived for future access in "Blog!: How the Newest Media Revolution is Changing Politics, Business, and Culture" that was co-written by himself and David Kline (2005). Further looking for “bloglike” phenomena in the history of civilization, the author identifies “proto-bloggers” such as the commentators of Talmudic tradition, Renaissance artists and thinkers whose works and diaries have taken the form of “commonplace books”.

According to Burstein, “blogs embed themselves into our new cultural DNA” because the needs of human beings “to communicate, argue publicly, learn collaboratively, share experiences and archive collective knowledge, have suddenly been married with incredibly powerful, fast, ubiquitous technologies”.

Mainstream media (MSM) of the 20th century that democratized communication, the author stresses that it made the majority of the “citizens voices heard but not always everyone’s voice”. Although the growing “niche and micro media” made their voices heard via radio, websites, cable TV, they were not enough to challenge the media monopoly and with blogging came along a “significant change in the equation”.

Recently, the BBC have announced plans to make its entire archives available for non-commercial use. The “BBC Creative Archive”, will offer more than 80 years of radio and broadcast pro­grams free to anyone. Additionally, the latter will be the host of the next “WeMedia” Conference".

...I think I should stop here and discuss with the students of what I told so far...

Along with citizen journalism, politics, and education, one of the latest trends regarding blogging has been business-oriented usage as a new channel for corporate communications and as a niche-marketing tool. Including the mainstream media (MSM), blogs are being increasingly popular in almost all sectors of the business world in various forms.

“Since the e-mail, users on a very large scale are learning a new writing interface,” says Ross Mayfield, the CEO of Socialtext Inc. Cone (2005) .

Among the pros of business blogging are low-cost, basic tools, such as training, project management, internal communication, and getting instant feedback from the targets, fresher content, and “humanizing corporate image”. A recent research project of The University of Liverpool gives detailed information about reasoning of business blogs from the corporate point of view (Hill, 2005).

One of the substances of blogging as the shift from “media” to “we-dia” Reynolds (2006) .

Thus, “bloggers” are acting as the new news sources [Kline and Burstein (2005) and Hewitt (2005) ] for the traditional media. What made this possible is the Internet by being “Everyone’s printing press” (Hall 2006).

As a self-regulatory approach, citizen-journalism has been improving blog ethics. The first code was drafted by Rebecca Blood who put forth six rules for ethical standards in 2002 . “The Corporate Weblog Manifesto” (in 2003) and the code of “The Blog Ethics Committee” (in 2004) and “Media Bloggers Association” (in 2006) followed her work. Since then, much debate has focused on the point of professionalism versus independency on the bloggers’ side.

Now, I have to prepare another entry in order to be able mentioning about law and blogs...

GRADUATION FROM LL.M IN IT & TELECOM LAW - STRATHCLYDE

I still cannot believe that it was over!

I am a graduate of the LL.M program of Strathclyde University, LAw School as of September 2006. The last months of the program was fully devoted to the dissertation. (*)
Although we never met, I have a lot of new friends and colleagues after 2 yrs of hard work. I highly recommend Strathclyde's LL.M program who have no time to go to the classes in person but deeply wish to be an expert in these relatively new fields of law...

After Harvard's programs such a curriculum and an European approach helped me to complete the puzzle...

Thanks a lot Professor Ian Lloyd, Moira Simpson, my tutors Susan Schiavetta, Ian King and Neil Bruce. Warmest thanks to administrative team specially to Carol Hutton, Denise Bula (now she's with another University though), Janet Ridell and Gareth Ryan, Assistant Librarian, Law Library!

(*) I have been working on its Turkish translation since then. My intention is to publish it in Turkey. The subject is not open to public yet! ;)