Warming up for wars of words

And while we’re on the topic of wars of words…

I’m in Philadelphia today, getting ready for a panel discussion early tomorrow as part of a day-long meeting on “The Hyperlinked Society“. Two of my co-panelists on the cryptically named “Linking in Web 2.0” panel are Nicholas Carr – author of some full-frontal assaults on Wikipedia – and Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia. I’m guessing this one will be fun to watch… I wish I was in the audience, rather than on stage, caught in the crossfire.

I’m just at the end of three weeks of absurd US travel (Boston, California, New York, Cape Cod, Philadelphia) and about to embark for ten days in Istanbul. I’m happy to discover that two of my fellow attendees here in Philly are the two Berkmanians I haven’t gotten to see lately – Jimmy and David Weinberger – primarily because these guys travel as much as I do.

If I were really smart, I’d spent the evening writing something controversial about Martin Nisenholtz and Times Digital just so we could have two battles tomorrow morning on the same panel rather than just arguing about Wikipedia…