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Short form of the controversy:

Dave Winer and Harvard are throwing a one-day blogging convention at Harvard. The entry fee is $500; $250 if you’re a Harvard affiliate. This strikes some people as too high.

Today, Dave explained why the fee was $500, as follows:

1. It’s absolutely non-profit.

OK, good. Irrelevant to why the cost is so high, though.

bq. 2. We will use the money to pay expenses for speakers and students who will get in for free, some of whom will have their expenses paid.

This is the bit that actually irked me enough to get me writing. Students aren’t getting in free; it’s costing them $250. Speakers will presumably get in free. But that doesn’t really speak to the question of where the $500 goes; you need to explain that before you claim that it’s meaningful to give anyone a discount. When you reduce this down to its actual components, what it says is that the money is going to pay for plane tickets and lodging.

3. We’re going to have parties and dinners, all of which cost a lot of money.

You know, I’d be totally OK paying for my own dinner, because I’m pretty sure I could swing it for less than $500. Even two dinners. I also don’t believe that $500 a head is a reasonable cost for a party — and let’s be real, this is a single party, because most of the attendees will have to clear out before Sunday night.

Maybe he’s planning on putting on lunch both days for the attendees? If so, perhaps he should consider not doing that to make it possible for more people to come.

I don’t know how many attendees he expects, but he has 12 presenters and moderators listed. At least two of them live in Boston. Many of them live on the East Coast. I’m having trouble believing that the numbers balance out.

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The new — the last — Warren Zevon album comes out on August 26th. The buzz is good.

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Boston’s doing pretty well in the community wireless sphere, although perhaps not as well as Portland. Now Somerville is talking about business-based free community wireless networks.

Not only is this fun times for me, it’s got cool potential as a prototype that could easily catch on elsewhere. Michael Oh is thinking of each network he builds as an instance of a larger concept, rather than building one-offs, which is the kind of thinking that makes a difference in the long term.

Meanwhile, there’s a Starbucks opening next to my laundromat of choice, so I can get online while doing laundry.

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Bravo started airing reruns of West Wing today with a six show marathon, so of course I watched the whole thing. Now I really recognize the vibe Mr. Sterling failed to achieve. Yep, that’s Sorkin, all right.

I liked it OK. Snappy dialogue, noble and honest politicians and staffers. My new theory is that Democratic resentment of Bush arises from his failure to live up to the example set by President Bartlet. (Sure, I’m joking.) But it’s a good show, and I like the impossibly witty characters.

So here’s my million dollar TV show idea. It’s a one hour drama, set in, say, Chicago. It focuses on a few families which are linked in some unlikely fashion; some are rich, some are poor, but all of them are doing something that matters. Oh, I know: it’s a newspaper drama! So you can have the spunky young hungry reporter and her husband and the editor and the owner and so on.

Half an hour of each show is written by Joss Whedon. Half an hour is written by Aaron Sorkin. Whedon owns the teenage kids. Sorkin owns the grownups. They can always throw plot twists at each other; Sorkin has to have the owner react when his daughter is caught smoking pot with the son of the hungry reporter, for example.

Ratings gold. The only problem with it is that David Kelley will be very miffed at being left out.