One of the Net's most prestigious, invitation-only free-trade zones for the exchange of potent ideas is opening its doors. A little.
Starting Thursday, two or three selected dialogs a month at Edge -- founded in 1996 by author and literary agent John Brockman -- will be open for public reading and discussion in a special area on Feed.
The first conversation addresses the question "What is the most important invention in the past 2000 years?" and boasts contributions from physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson, geneticist Richard Dawkins (who coined the word meme), and artificial-life pioneer Christopher Langton.
Langton votes for the telescope and Darwin's theory of evolution. Dawson claims the spectroscope trumps the telescope by adding the power of analysis. Dyson makes a pitch for hay.
Other heavyweight schmoozers on the Edge include meta-musician Brian Eno, technology theoretician David Gelertner, The Society of Mind author Marvin Minsky, information-systems thinker Joseph Traub, near-death-state psychologist Susan Blackmore, cyber-rights advocate Mike Godwin, and virtual-reality maven Jaron Lanier.
Brockman -- whose projects include an influential floating salon called the Reality Club -- said he founded the Edge because he was tired of watching his friends in the digital domain work on solely commercial projects.
"Everyone around me in that world is highly intelligent, well read, and erudite -- serious people who want to do good things," he said from his office in Manhattan. "But what do they do? They do portals, they do push technology. Instead of rising to the occasion, they're adopting all the old mass-market models being pushed by the conglomerates."
By hosting the Edge discussions, Brockman said he hopes to "target bright people who have a hunger for ideas, an intellectual yearning. That's where I live."
Feed founder Stefanie Syman said the partnership with Edge will allow her publication to broaden its coverage of new developments in high-level scientific thought and "further raise the signal-to-noise ratio" on the Web.
The first-day surge of participation in the forum's public area -- from people all over the world -- shows there's significant interest in intellectually challenging discussion on the Net, Syman said.
"If this was a panel, you could maybe get in one question," she observed. "This is a kind of conversation you couldn't have in any other medium."
