I asked economist and activist Harry Cleaver for his reaction to some of the issues raised at the conference. Here is what he had to say about networked culture, politics, and what Marx might make of MAKE magazine:

On machinma, anime remix, and World of Warcraft:

Well, with respect to machinma and anime remix, it's my impression that the availability of tools is giving more people access to such means of expression. However, two things: first, the tools are still complex and, from all we heard, terribly time consuming so that "access" means little at this point because very few people have either the skills or the time and energy to devote to such efforts; second, as a result, it seems that the result is only a very marginal contribution to "participatory culture" and that contribution takes more the form of creating and circulating artistic works than contributions to any kind of community interactivity.

From John Tomasic's blog

The netpublics group at the annenberg center for communication at USC threw an interesting party this past weekend. Ok, I guess it was a conference. But in addition to academics, it hosted journalists and new-media “makers,

It's not just US mainstream popular culture that is putting pressure on France to globalize. The machinima film The French Democracy offers an alternative version of the recent riots in France complete with a Manhattan backdrop and English subtitles.

To claim the centralized nature the riots that have plagued France for the past 13 nights seems to be a tactic employed by those attempting to deny the legitimacy of rioters rage. Those like Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who called the rioters “la racaille

Net Publics Julian Bleecker is mentioned in an article on the new media scene in LA in this week’s LA Times. Even more interesting than the article is the rancorous discussion it set of on LA new media artists and their relation to the military/education/entertainment complex. You can read the discussion here. And here is a post that didn’t make it onto the list.

In "bloggers to have less rights than journalists?", Kazys Varnelis writes:

bq. "The 2005 Free Flow of Information Act is designed to protect journalists from having to reveal the names of their anonymous sources except under specific conditions. On Monday, however, the bill's co-sponsor, US Senator Richard Lugar—who said he was inspired to write the legislation by columnist Judith Miller's recent imprisonment for not revealing her source to a court—suggested that bloggers would not be considered journalists under this law."

The comment by Luger was actually a question, according to Seth Finkelstein responding to Dan Gillmor. The full quote reads:

bq. "As to who is a reporter, this will be a subject of debate as this bill goes farther along (...) Are bloggers journalists? Or some of the commercial businesses that you here would probably not consider real journalists? Probably not, but how do you determine who will be included in this bill?"

kausfiles also weighs in on the journalist vs. blogger protection.

Is anyone surprised, though, that journalists would be granted privileges and protections that bloggers are not?

In President Bush’s speech about war on terror to the National Endowment for Democracy today it seemed at first as if he might give Arab media outlets and the Internet a break by including some good old fashion media in the catagory of spreaders of evil when he said, “We know the vision of the radicals because they've openly stated it -- in videos, and audiotapes, and letters, and declarations, and websites.