Despite some worries that Hurricane Isabel may wash away TPRC, it was held this past weekend in Arlington, VA and lived up to its reputation as a wonderful meeting for those interested in various communications policy issues. It is the only conference I have attended consistently without fail since I first showed up there five years ago. It is always held in the DC area to ensure a good turnout from government representatives (or I’m assuming that’s a reason for its location).

It’s a good conference for the following reasons:

1. high quality of papers (this year’s acceptance rate was around 25%)
2. a relatively small and friendly group that has been getting together for years but is also very open to meeting new participants
3. a great mix of people from government (mostly the FCC but others as well), the private sector (fewer reps now than a couple of years ago) and academia (mostly economists and legal scholars but various other social scientists and some others as well)

Not surprisingly, the issue of media deregulation came up throughout the conference. There was a lunch-time debate between Andrew Schwartzman of the Media Access Project and Randolph May of the Progress & Freedom Foundation about this. A point Andy Schwartzman kept bringing up was that now with the availability of so much information on the Internet, there should be less concern about what is available via other media.

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Eugene Volokh “sez”:http://volokh.com/2003_09_21_volokh_archive.html#106437620610467368

bq. Work? Blogging? Sleep? Or _Quicksilver_? I say _Quicksilver_.

_Quicksilver_ junkies will want to know about the Quicksilver “Wiki”:http://www.metaweb.com/wiki/wiki.phtml that Neal Stephenson has set up, which will allow people collectively to annotate the book, its characters, ideas, and whatever odd tangents they find interesting. Via “BoingBoing”:http://boingboing.net/2003_09_01_archive.html#106438136711313636.

“Dan Drezner”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000756.html and I are co-writing an academic paper on blogging and politics – if you’re a journalist, columnist, commentator, producer, or editor for a newspaper, magazine, or television station, we’d appreciate your help. We’d be grateful if you could take two minutes to send an email to ddrezner@hotmail.com with answers to the following five questions:

1) How many blogs do you read a day?

2) Please name the three blogs you read most frequently. [What if you read less than three? Then just name the ones you do read.]

3) Why do you read the blogs you read? In other words, what makes those blogs worth checking out on a regular basis?

4) Have you ever read something on a blog that affected your decision-making on what to air/publish? If the answer is yes, can you give an example?

5) How much influence do you think blogs have on political discourse? A lot, a little, or none at all?

All answers will be kept confidential unless you give us explicit permission to do otherwise in your email. Dan has also posted our “working definition”:http://www.danieldrezner.com/archives/000754.html of what a blog is – comments and suggestions gratefully appreciated.

Thanks!