Reflections on room 127

Woke up still jangling with adrenaline and ideas after yesterday’s intense afternoon in Room 127 of the Yale Law School. I’ve spent an hour this morning cleaning up yesterday’s notes and adding a few links.

Denise Howell, paraphrasing Glenn Reynolds from room 127, puts it this way: “Blogs, done right, provide the reader with a unique opportunity to get to *know* the writer, without and/or before ever meeting him or her.” Not surprising, I guess, since reading a blog is close as we get to “mind reading.”

In his recap, Tim Schnabel also enjoyed the confluence of mind and body in Room 127: “So for one day, the blogosphere actually had a physical center, a nexus of sorts, a town hall… call it what you will, it was interesting.”

Was it worth taking notes and postin real time? Who knows. As traffic logs show, most newspaper articles interest only 1 in 100 readers. Here’s the reaction of off-site event-watcher Renee Hopkins: “Somebody emailed the Kitchen Cabinet bloggers with the question, “does anyone care about this minute-by-minute reporting?!’ The answer is YES! I do!! I bet I’m not the only one, either. This attendance-by-blog is almost as good as being there.”

My favorite lines from yesterday:

Glenn Reyonds: “We will see the growth of weblogs and other thin media that are partially competive and partially symbiotic with big media.”

Jenny Levine: “Reading RSS on PDA with wireless is the ultimate in shifted information.”

Donna Wentworth: Art & blogs “are like people who are possessed of a driving will to please us.”

Mickie Kaus: “Many of the givens of journalism turn out to be artifacts of print technology.”

Me: “We need more Minutemen journalists.”

Rorry Perry: “The public can use Google as a de facto search engine of West Virginia legal information and decisions.”

Great job Yale Law team. Let’s do another in March!