I’ve begun my personal Summer of Madness tour a bit early, considering that we still have a week left of spring. But there’s no question about the Madness part.
This morning at Harvard Law, Molly Krause filled me in on the exciting H2O playlist project that will soon be unveiled by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. I shot a video of Molly and hope to post it soon. Then I gave the guest talk during lunch with about 40 Berkmanites and guests in attendance. I talked about the origins of Darknet and Ourmedia, and was peppered not only with thoughtful questions but also suggestions about tagging, licensing and possibilities for collaboration with various universities.
At the end of the session, Berkman founder Charles Nesson agreed to accept an invitation to serve on Ourmedia’s Board of Advisors, and my friend Amanda let me post the first guest entry on the Berkman blog.
One of the (many) highlights for me was meeting videoblogger Steve Garfield in person at last. Steve videotaped the session and did a mini-interview with me afterward that he hopes will be shown on Rocketboom tomorrow. Will let you know if it does.
Took the shuttle to LaGuardia and a taxi to midtown (my friend Norman is putting me up again at the schmoozy Trump International Hotel on 1 Central Park West — great view of Central Park’s rolling green expanse). I’ll soon be meeting with Jennifer K. (a friend who helped put out the word about Ourmedia) and Brian August (whom I’m in town to meet)
But I can’t let go unremarked a new cultural phenomenon I’ve noticed: Taxi drivers yakking on their cell phones. I dismissed it as an aberration the first couple of times. But the last four times I’ve stepped into a taxi cab — in San Francisco and New York — at least half the time I was in the cab the driver was jabbering away in his native tongue (today was Arabic, last time was Farsi) to his wife, his friends, I don’t know, his third cousins. Today’s driver made no less than five calls and launched into a very loud exchange with each caller. The receptionist at Trump (yeah, I know how elitist that sounds) pointed out that it’s illegal to make such calls without a hands-free phone under state law. Still, it’s not the legality of the thing that irked me. Just seemed downright rude.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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