A reminder to all our Washington DC-and-environs VCers: A week from this coming Wednesday (Feb. 4th) I'm going to be talking at a Cato Institute Book Forum about my book, In Search of Jefferson's Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace."It should be an interesting event: Cato has rounded up two outstanding commenters -- Jeff Rosen, whom I'm sure most of you are familiar with from his work on legal subjects in The New Republic and The NY Times and elsewhere (and who has also written widely and well on cyberspace-related issues), and Clive Crook, a Senior Editor at the Atlantic and Washington columnist for the Financial Times (whose work you may not be familiar with, but he's a very sharp guy with a very interesting perspective on US politics and history).

I'm genuinely looking forward to hearing what they have to say. One thing about my book: it's a hard book to talk about to an audience of people most of whom (as I have to assume) haven't (yet!) read the book. The book's about a way of thinking about the Net -- a Jeffersonian way of thinking -- and it doesn't so much try to persuade the reader to engage in that way of thinking as it just plunges in and begins starts thinking about problems that way. If I could explain it in fewer than 200 pages, I would have done so - but I can't. That's why I had to write a book, rather than a blog posting or a law review article, about it. So, knowing that Jeff and Clive (both of whom have read the book) should ensure some kind of push-back on the ideas in the book, sufficient at least to generate some interesting discussion.

You can sign up for the event here (there's also going to be a live webcast available on that page on the day of the event). [Cato events are free, but require pre-registration). Come if you can (and introduce yourself - it's always nice to put faces to names for the people one only knows on the Net).

[And in the buzz-generating department, there's an essay over on Concurring Opinions (in their "Bright Ideas" series) about how I came up with and use the moose metaphor in the book; and Adam Thierer's got a review over at the Technology Liberation Front]