I'll be at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the next two days at a conference for the winners of the Knight News Challenge. CMLP was a lucky recipient of a Knight News Challenge award in 2007. The conference, which Knight plans to make an annual event, is being hosted by MIT's Center for Future Civic Media (which, incidentally, also won a News Challenge award last year).

It has been a fascinating day and a half so far, with presentations by both MIT researchers and Knight award winners, such as Adrian Holovaty, who showed off EveryBlock, an impressive aggregator and filter of local news by location, and Lisa Williams, founder of Placeblogger.

I won't even pretend to provide comprehensive coverage of this conference, especially when some of the best conference bloggers on the planet are here. For "live" coverage, you can't do better than Ethan Zuckerman and Amy Gahran. Ethan has several insightful posts up already (see here and here) and Amy is putting her fingers to the test by "live tweeting" at amylive.

So if the CMLP postings are bit light over the next two days, you'll know why.

(Note: We have been experiencing some problems with our servers; please accept our apologies for the slowness of the site.)