symposium, eh?

One of the great things about being located in Cambridge (and the big advantage it has over living in, say, Charlottesville, Virginia) is the abundance of lectures/symposiums that seem to be held on an almost daily basis. Not only are they in great quantity, they are also typically catered.

This particular event was Corante's Symposium on Social Architecture, which featured a talk entitled: How Will The Social Web Change Media? It was indeed well-catered (although I only stuck around for the last two sessions).

Needlesstosay, reddit didn't come up in the panel discussion, but there was some genuinely good discussion about the effect of the web on the media. Things got interesting during the following session, when web-based civics was discussed. Plenty of people talked about encouraging municipalities to install WiFi (a choice quote from NYC mayor Mike Bloomberg: "Will we have to dig up the streets?"), but no one mentioned Google's aspirations.

I wonder who will get it done first...