Networks of amateurs (in astronomy, publishing) are displacing the professionals -- Leabeater, quoted by Rael Dornfest

Too much important knowledge is locked up on paper where it's not searchable and hard to get to. -- Jeff Bezos, also by Rael.

Pay attention to design patterns for innovation -- Tim O'Reilly. Examples:

• Build with "Small Pieces, Loosely Joined": (borrowing the David Weinberger book title)
• Design for participation, e.g., have users add value to your data (Amazon user book reviews)
• Make participation the default: Aggregate user data as a side effect. (Flickr's default for sharing is public)
• Data is the next "Intel Inside": owning a unique, hard-to-replicate data source as a competitive advantage

I introduced Cory Doctorow of EFF to John Markoff, the results of which will hopefully be reflected in coverage in tomorrow's New York Times. My take on the issue under discussion: This conference started as a P2P event in 2001, but has gone very far beyond it. Sharing is no longer about downloading music and movies. The most interesting applications like Del.icio.us and Flickr are based on sharing of information owned by the poster and have spawned intense ecologies of innovation because of their open API's. While an adverse outcome in the Grokster case would definitely not be desirable, in will not slow the tide of innovation. Hollywood's business interests don't enter into this equation.

Conference coverage here.