Seems like it was another good summer for the Oxford Internet Institute (OII). I gave a seminar there this week (about blogs and criticism: how blogs have been subject to accusations of narcissism and exhibitionism, not unlike how certain other forms of intimacy get policed) to attendees from (almost) all over the world. I also sat on a panel in the evening about collaborations between industry and academia. Which did a lot of things, one of which, for me, was to highlight the poverty of categories and panel titles. The world that the men from Microsoft and Cisco were describing didn't look or act much like the world that I know, and yet we were all ostensibly talking about the same thing. Industry+academic collaborations have many faces; it's meaningless to say that they are a good thing or a bad thing overall; we have to specify our terms. I tried.

Thanks to the OII for inviting me again.

-kris