Lights-Out, Then On Again
Dear readers,
It's been fun, but this ambivalent imbroglio is hereby closed for business. It became a lot more about law school than I anticipated, and now that law school is over...
But hey, when one door closes, another opens, right? You are hereby cordially invited to become a regular reader of the brand new blog on the block: the imbroglio!
Thanks to everyone who has visited, commented, and otherwise made ambivalent imbroglio such a rewarding project for me over the last three years. I hope you will join me in making the transition to what promise to be bigger and better things.
humbly yours,
ambimb
Posted 05:27 PM
So tired of Moveable Type!
This site and others living on the same shared server have been down much more often than usual recently. Last night I got an email from Dreamhost saying that part of the recent problems is that my account has been using about 120 CPU minutes/day—twice what Dreamhost considers acceptable for a user on a shared server. A quick look at the logs shows that something close to 80% of that usage comes from two Moveable Type scripts—the scripts for comments and trackbacks. Thanks to an array of plugins (so many I can hardly keep track of them all), I haven't seen much trouble w/blog spam for a while—almost none of it makes it through to the blog. Unfortunately, just because I don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. Thanks to MT 3.2's new “junk” system (in which comments get “junked” if they're spam, rather than being rejected), the spammers can still flood the system with comments and trackbacks. The filters will make sure I don't see it, but all that spam is still slamming the server.
So what to do? Close comments? Trackbacks are gone already. I've rarely found them very useful so I don't think I'll miss them. Close comments on old entries? Yes, ok, but the tools available for that all seem a little cumbersome for a blog w/1400 entries. Other than changing the name of the comment script on a regular basis (a hassle, at best), I'm just not sure what to do.
There was a time when playing w/all this blog stuff was just fun. When problems like this would arise I saw it as a little excuse to tinker and learn more about these things. But now I'm feeling a little more irritated by this sort of thing. Blogger/blogspot or even Typepad are looking better all the time. Is it time to move to WordPress?
Posted 10:20 AM | Comments (68) | TrackBack
Laughing at BigLawyers
If you'd like a daily bit of humor from the BigLaw trenches, head over to The Disassociate, a relatively new blog whose author describes it as:
one associate's attempt to see the humor, to focus on the lighter side, to find the fun. Somewhere along the way...repaying student loans, billing hours, monitoring salaries, many of us lost the sense of enjoyment, not about the law, but within the profession. Every day is funny, we just need to stop and think about it. I'll try to do that, but feel free to help. And just to be clear, I like working at my firm - I am just trying to get the fun back. Thanks for coming by.
Posts at “The Disassociate” are generally very short (usually one sentence) and generally worth at least a chuckle. One of my favorites is entitled “Crying out of the law” and reads:
See? I told you it was funny. And in view of the upcoming graduation season, check out “Pomp & Circumstance”:
Ah yes. The golden future that awaits so many of us.... I hope to never concern myself with billing hours, but otherwise....
Anyway, if you're ever looking for a bit of law-related laughter, The Disassociate might be a good place to start.
Happy Blog Birthday to Life, Law, Gender!
Denise is celebrating her 2-year blog birthday today—congratulations, Denise! As I said over there, Life, Law, Gender contibutes immeasurably to broadening the understanding of its readers and is unique (as far as I know) in at least the law school blogosphere. Denise writes helpfully and with great honesty about being transgendered and about how political and social developments are affecting the transgender and gay and lesbian communities. Those are obviously valuable contributions to the law school blog discourse, but Denise also has a vast amount of life experience in many other areas, as well, much of which she blogs about from time to time as a way of sharing some of what she's learned along the way. In short, Life, Law, Gender is a great blog and a daily read for me. If you haven't visited recently, I recommend you check it out. Oh, and wish Denise a happy blog birthday while you're there!
Posted 10:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Blawgging for dollars?
Law Books for Less has just started a new affiliate program that will allow bloggers to earn 5% of every sale generated from their sites. You can redeem your commission as LawBooksForLess.com gift certificates or cash—your choice when you sign up.
This is similar to the Amazon Associates program, so it's nothing new. The difference is that law students must buy books, so is it possible they might try to help each other out by buying books through links on the blogs of fellow law students?
It's an interesting idea. What do you think, people? Want to buy all your books through the imbroglio from now on? ;-)
I used to be pretty down on all the different ways to scrape together a few pennies online. However, in the last year I've made enough through different referral programs like this to pay for all my web hosting (not a small bill) and then some. That means I (and everyone on blawgcoop.com) get to blog for free and that's pretty cool. I have no desire to become some web entrepreneur (ok, not much of a desire, anyway), but at least until I get a job and a regular paycheck, not having to pay to blog is a really nice thing.
By the way, the Dreamhost Rewards has been the most lucrative source of income for me by far. Thank you so much to those of you who donated to the hosting of this site or signed up with Dreamhost and named me as your referrer!
Say it ain't so, Half-Cocked!
Sadness. Mr. Half-Cocked says he's hanging up the keyboard. He's a 3L and says:
That's exactly what I'm looking for these days—like-minded individuals! Bring on those incoherent rants, please!
As I said before, I understand the impulse to stop blogging. I've taken more and more frequent breaks from it myself recently (such as the last few days), but I'm still sad to watch blogs I've read regularly for years now start to drift away into internet oblivion. It's really too bad b/c I'm sure the next year of our lives (for those of us who are graduating from law school) is going to be packed with uncertainty and new experiences—exactly the kind of thing that makes for excellent blog posts and comment conversations. Law student blogs have become a great resource for law students to commiserate with and learn from each other as we all go through this roughly similar process. Why should that end at graduation?
Ok, I know why—or at least some of the reasons why. It's one thing to blog about how you were so scared you almost peed your pants when you were a 1L getting cold-called, but it's an entirely different thing to be a new law firm associate or other lawyer feeling exactly the same way. The two situations are very similar in how they make us feel—stupid, scared, totally unprepared. Yet, in the law school setting we feel free to blog about it because we know we're expected to be clueless, while in the work setting we seem to think we're expected to know what we're doing so we become afraid to admit to the world how clueless we are. That's silly, really. Anyone who expects a newly-minted J.D. to be anything but clueless about the actual practice of law is sadly misinformed about the nature of law school. We don't learn to practice law, we learn to live with huge amounts of debt!
Another reason I suspect recent graduates don't want to blog is that they aren't sure what they can say in their new lives as working attorneys. In law school you can talk about pretty much anything that happens in your daily life without concern about professional privilege or ethics or whatever. That's obviously not true once you've started working with actual clients and cases. Lawyers who have been at it for a while (e.g., Evan Schaeffer) probably feel more confident about what they can and can't say with regard to work. They are also not overwhelmed by the newness of their working lives and so have time and energy to think and blog about other things.
Still, it's possible to blog about the transition from school to work, about the bar exam and about being a recent grad just starting your first legal job. If you don't believe me, just check out Woman of the Law (WotL). As she noted in the comments here, she's one of the few law student bloggers to make the transition to practitioner blogger. And although she doesn't have much time to post these days, I know I'm willing to wait for each and every post, and I know I'm not alone.
I understand that not everyone can or wants to try to do what WotL is doing. Who knows? I may even end up hanging up the keyboard in the next year or so. But until that happens, I'll still be sad to see great law student blogs die as their authors move into the working world.
Best of luck to you, Half-Cocked. I'll stay subscribed to your feed so if you ever decide to post one of those incoherent rants, please know you'll still have at least one reader.
Posted 08:57 AM | Comments (1)
Blawg Wisdom Issues
If you haven't visited Blawg Wisdom recently you've missed a few great updates from myself and Kristine, including a request for input on the future of the site. If you have thoughts on that, I'd love to hear them, but here's something perhaps even more important:
Someone has somehow embedded some crappy pop-up ad on Blawg Wisdom! I don't have a clue how they did this except that the site was hacked around the new year and I assume they got this in then. The trouble is I can't see how to get rid of it. It's an embedded image on the page; you can't see it b/c it's an invisible gif but it triggers a popup. You can see it's there if you use Firefox and choose “Page Info” from the tools media, then click the “Media” tab.
So there it is. The question: Do you know how I can get rid of this? Looking at the page source doesn't reveal it, and it's not in the MT template, so what the heck? Any ideas?
Posted 02:27 PM | Comments (7)
Top-40 Flickr Interestingness Is Mine!
I was happy to discover late last night that my recent photo of the Washington Monument and its reflection made it into the top-40 on Flickr's “interestingness” scale yesterday. The screen capture at right is proof! If you look through those “interestingness” pages right now the photo has fallen to around 75 and will probably keep sinking, but it's just nice to see it getting so much attention.
For you non-Flickerites, “interestingness” is some amorphous measure of how many times a photo has been viewed, commented on, and made a favorite by other Flickr users. So it's both a measure of popularity and of an image's ability to spark conversation or elicit a response.
My ambivalent images project will hit its 2-year mark on March 10, 2006. I wasn't really sure how long I would continue it when it started, and there have been times when it has just seemed silly, but it has also been a fun diversion and I'm really glad to have the odd sort of record it provides of life in the last two years. I started trying to cross-post some of the “best” shots (the ones I liked or ones that other people commented on) on Flickr both to give them a wider audience and because it helps me connect w/other photographers (both casual and more professional) and gives me inspiration by giving me a chance to check out what other people are doing. The only problem with Flickr is that it's like a very deep well and once you start looking in you have to be careful you don't fall in and get lost fo hours. I just today found out about all these great Flickr Toys and I can already see I'm going to waste a lot of time playing with them sometime soon.
Anyway, once I'm finished with school it's kind of up in the air whether I'll be able to continue posting a photo every day, but we'll see. For now, I hope you see one occasionally that you enjoy!
Note: If you've ever wanted to have a screenshot of an entire webpage rather than just the bit that fits into your screen at any one time, check out Papparazzi for Mac OS X.
Hello, Accuracy
The Accuracy Blog appears to be a new blog about law school, politics, and current events by law student Chris Laurel. In one recent post he/she decries the sorry state of legal education and proposes a relatively simple fix: more frequent testing to measure progress and more teaching assistants to help students learn. That sounds like a fine start to me, although I would still add that the 3rd year seems unnecessary, at least in its current “more of the same” form.
Anyway: Welcome to the law student blog thing, Chris!
Posted 03:12 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
At First I Scoffed
I just noticed that I was tagged by MeSawYou a couple off weeks ago. Oops. My assignment was:
1. Go into your archives. 2. Find your 23rd post. 3. Post the fifth sentence (or closest to it). 4. Post the text of the sentence in your blog along with these instructions. 5. Tag five other people to do the same thing.
My 23rd post was about spinning (as in pedaling fast to music on a stationary bike), which I really love(d). (I know I'd still enjoy it, I just haven't found a good place to get back into it since I moved to DC.) The fifth sentence was:
I couldn't ask for anything better. Hard to believe that was on September 1, 2002. Have I really been doing this for three freaking years? I know, that's not that long, but still... Is that something to lament or be proud of?
Anyhoo, the final part of the assignment is to “tag” five other people, but I'm pretty sure most people I can think of have been “tagged” already. Still, I'll give it a try:
- Energy Spatula
- Mackenzie
- Greyhame
- Sui Generis
- Audacity (who we should congratulate for officially becoming a lawyer, so: Congratulations! Those 70% out-of-state bar passage rates in Georgia are very scary for those of us planning to take bar exams in states where we didn't attend law school....)
Posted 10:38 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Comments Problemos
Dear Readers,
If you have attempted to leave a comment here in recent weeks and never saw it show up on the site, I apologize. Since I upgraded to MT 3.2, I've been trying to figure out the optimal settings for its new spam filter. Apparently, I had the setting turned too high and all of your great comments were getting junked. I believe I have fixed that and your comments should now appear as soon as you post them (at least for the most part). I will also start watching this more closely in the future. Again, I apologize. Your comments are pretty much makes this worth doing, so please comment early and often. Thanks!
p.s.: Is Typekey authentication working for anyone?
Posted 08:39 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Welcome to the MT 3.2 Imbroglio!
It's done. I think. This blog and several others running on the same install are now running on Movable Type 3.2. I used these instructions to complete the upgrade; they were supposed to make the process safer somehow, but I really don't understand how. Whatever, it seemed to work and that's really what counts. This will mean next to nothing to you, but hey, I just wanted to share.
Even neatoer, I finally got the bits box to operate properly so that I can just post some quick links w/out making any “regular” post to the blog. And thanks to Andrew Raff, I also now know how to control the number of entries that appear on this page. (So basically I resolved the two problems I complained of here.) Again, this will mean little to you, except that it makes me a happier blogger, and that's got to be good for you somehow, in a really super-attenuated way. Maybe.
One other change you may or may not notice is that the blogroll is a little different (on the left). I used to have several different categories of links that were coming from del.icio.us rss feeds via the MT-RSS plugin. However, that plugin is apparently no longer being supported or isn't compatible with 3.2 or I just couldn't make it work (I don't remember; I didn't try very hard), so instead the blogroll is being generated by the Blogroll plugin, which I really like and highly recommend. It allows you to create categories of links, annotate them, and display them in all sorts of ways. I'm still going through the links to try to get them all in appropriate categories, so bear with me as I work through that. What's kind of sad is the number of blogs that are dead, gone, or just on really long breaks. I keep finding them and it's a bit depressing. It can also be confusing. For example, what the heck has been going on at Inter Alia recently? It sounds like there's a big blogging scandal at SW Law but I haven't been able to figure out how it all started or what it all means. Has anyone been following that?
Anyway, welcome to MT 3.2. Enjoy! And if you see funky things that you think were unintentional, please let me know.
GW Law Profs Blogging Like MadMEN
I noted the other day that GW's SBA seems to be getting its online house in order, but I would be remiss if I did not also note the veritable explosion of GW professors entering (or already in) the blawgosphere. As far as I know, blogging GW professors include:
- Paul Butler at blackprof.com
- Orin Kerr at The Volokh Conspiracy
- Spencer Overton at blackprof.com
- Daniel Solove at Concurring Opinions and Balkinization
And speaking of blogging professors, why are so many of them male? Or to put it another way, why are so few female?
Ok, I am so wrong about GW's 4 blogging profs being even a little impressive. According to The Conglomerate, the U of Wisconsin Law School has about 16 faculty blogs, at least two of which are by women—Ann Althouse and Nina Camic. And, of course, Christine Hurt is another female professor blogging at The Conglomerate, so maybe there's more balance out there than I realize. Her institution, Marquette U. Law School, also has at least six faculty blogs, so again, GW's four is looking more anemic all the time.
Still, even if GW is not on the top of schools in terms of numbers of blogging profs, these four are four more than existed (or at least four more than I knew about) when I started school two years ago, so I consider this great progress. Blog on, GW profs, blog on!
Posted 10:47 AM
Argh, Maties! Bloody Spammers Be Improvin'!
Spam spam spam!
How I loathe spam.
All day all night,
try as I might,
I just can't stop the damn spam!
So have you seen the new comment spam technique? The spammer signs the comment w/an average sounding name (rather than the usual random numbers and digits gibberish) and uses a legitimate blog URL for the “return” url field. The links in the body of the comment are also legit—they go to what appear to be legitimate and innocent blogs. And that's it. But the text of the comment doesn't make logical sense. It starts w/the usual stuff like “I really like your site” or whatever, but then it will just have a couple of these links and some nonsense text. Fine. It looks like spam, but fairly harmless spam. So why would this be worth a spammer's time if it doesn't even point to any spam-like URLs?
The spam URLs are hidden! I don't know how they do it, but the comment itself does not show that there are additional spam links buried in it somehow. However, when you run it through Blacklist, the spam URLs show up to be blacklisted. How do they do that?
I need to upgrade this MT install to MT 3.2! For those who have upgraded, are you finding your spam woes have decreased?
Posted 08:48 AM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
Althouse Express!
Congratulations to Professor Althouse for being quoted on page 37 of Tuesday's Express newspaper. The paper is available here in PDF format (caution: huge file!), but the relevant portion is reproduced at right (click to enlarge). The paper quoted Althouse's comments on the risk that the flood of money into the hurricane-ravaged areas of the gulf coast will lead to a different form of looting as unscrupulous individuals and corporations vie to get their hands on those recovery dollars.
Somehow Althouse seems to have become something like an A-list blogger—she's on lots of radar screens. Is this because she's a law prof and therefore has some kind of automatic credibility? Is it because she claims to be a middle-roader politically? Or is it simply the fact that she posts so frequently and on such a wide range of topics? The world will probably never know.
Oh, for those not familiar, the Express is a tabloid daily that's printed by the Washington Post and available for free throughout the city (but predominantly around metro stations so people can read it on their commute).
Blawg Review #23: The Dynamic Sortable Table Edition
Holy cow. Check out the coolness that is Blawg Review #23 at Preaching to the Perverted! It's brilliantly organized using a dynamic table that lets you sort its content by post title, content descritption, post author, and topic of post. So instead of reading through the links in the order Dave! decided to present them, you can read through the links in whatever order your heart desires. Pretty snazzy, Dave!
In addition to being technically super-spiffy, this edition of Blawg Review also containssurprise!some terrific links, including:
Robert Ambrogi: "Lawyers including Ted Frank, Glenn Reynolds and David Kopel are calling for the shooting of looters. I am appalled that members of the legal profession would call for unbridled, vigilante street justice. This is contrary to every fundamental principle we should stand for as lawyers." I couldn't agree more.
White Collar Crime Prof Blog: "Richard Hatch, the first Survivor winner, has now been indicted on ten counts of tax fraud and using funds intended for a charity for personal expenses." Greedy greedy.
But wait a minute. If I tell what all the great links are, you won't read the Review. So go there, ok? I'm apparently supposed to do another of these things in about two weeks and there's really no way I'll be able to top this so enjoy it while you can....
Blawg Review 21 & 22
The latest edition of the carnival of law blogs, Blawg Review #21, is now up at My Shingle and it's packed with great links to some of the best content around the blawgosphere, including: Should law profs wear jeans? Carolyn Elefant says no, and while I admire her greatly, I respectfully disagree. Law is far too stuffy and the dress code at every level is exceedingly ridiculous. Law profs should wear jeans and lawyers should wear jeans and judges should wear jeans. Law should not be the province of those who dress “correctly”—it belongs to the citizens of the nation it helps govern and only a small fraction of those people can afford or want to wear monkey suits and all the rest of the extraneous trappings lawyers seem to think are so important. This is yet another reason I hope to someday practice law in the Rocky Mountain region. Sure, there are firms there that require the monkey suit, but if you head out into smaller communities you'll find that “dressing up” means nice boots or shoes, jeans, a clean button-down shirt (often western cut but not necessarily), and a sportcoat. Boots, tie, and cowboy hat optional. That's much more my style.
Yeah, you can take the boy out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the boy. And yeah, standards are different for women, but they are also more relaxed, I believe.
If you think about this as a pedagogical question and ask what kind of message you're sending by your dress, there are obviously arguments on both sides. However, I read the support of suits as a silly ploy for power, an attempt to “establish authority” in the classroom. Authoritarian classrooms, like authoritarian regimes, suck, and that's just one reason law school often sucks. So do your students a favor law profs and drop the silly games. Wear what you want and be a human being, not an “authority figure.”
Oh, and just to add to the mix: I had a prof last year at GW who wore some kind of leather-like pants. He never wore a sportcoat or blazer, and I'm pretty sure he wore jeans a few times. He also had some wild shirts with flames and other crazy decorations on them. He was a little goofy, but his dress code didn't make any difference to me. I'm glad he wore what he was comfortable with. Everyone should do that.
TANGENT! Anyhoo, once you've finished reading all the great stuff there, be sure and follow these submission guidelines to send your posts in for Blawg Review #22. The host will be Blawg Wisdom and the theme will be “back-to-school.” But while the focus will be on that theme, #22 will obviously include posts on a wide range of topics. So find a good post or two—either your own or something you read from somewhere else—and send it in. And thanks for playing!
Posted 10:47 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
BlawgCoop Welcomes Mother In Law!
Welcome to Mother In Law, the most recent addition to the BlawgCoop, the co-op for law-related blogs. LawMom has moved to BlawgCoop from her old home on a for-profit blog service where she was feeling the pinch of a monthly fee. She'll be starting law school this fall, and like many other law students, she was concerned that in addition to taking time away from studying, that monthly fee meant her blogging was also taking money away from her wallet. Her solution? Move to BlawgCoop and blog for about as close as you can get to free!
LawMom joins Half-Cocked, Divine Angst, Bad Glacier, Legal Fictions, and Blawg Wisdom at the 'Coop, and if you'd like a Movable Type or Wordpress blog w/very little cost or hassle, you're always welcome to join them.
Posted 02:59 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Ambits Problems: Suggestions?
Since I reintroduced the new ambits format a few weeks ago I've discovered a couple of problems. The first is that if I try to post ambits w/out posting anything to the main blog, the variable statement doesn't handle it right and wraps the previous day's post into the ambits div. Does that make sense? If you click the image on the right you'll see a snapshot of what I'm talking about. I'm using this code but I don't exactly understand what all of it is doing so I don't know what to change to make this stop. I'd like to be able to post ambits-only on some days when I don't really have anything to say or the time to say it.
The other problem is simply that that code only appears to allow me to display about 4 days worth of posts on my main index page. If you look at that code, can you tell whether there's some variable there to change that? Normally I'd be looking for an MTEntries n=“x” tag, but there's nothing like that in this code. I think it might be replaced by the MTSQLEntries tag, but that's followed by all the stuff I don't really understand. Do any of you w/more web fu understand this? Any suggestions? Thanks!
OPML Editor for Mac!
I started playing with Dave Winer's new OPML Editor on Friday, but really I was just checking it out because at the time it was Windows-only. No longer! The Mac version is here!
I wrote about the OPML Editor about a month ago—just sort of thinking out loud about how it might be helpful to lawyers. I don't have anything to add to those ideas yet, but after playing with it just a little I can say it's definitely fun to use and it shows lots of potential. The fact that it's open source means any programmer who sees that potential can try to turn it into reality, and I'd put money on there being lots of great applications of shared outlines and outlines-as-blogs by, oh, I don't know, this time next year.
Why does this matter? How about this: Law students could create “instant outlines” of their class notes. Everyone in the same class could subscribe to that same outline. Whenever anyone updated the outline, everyone who was subscribed would instantly see the changes and have them in his/her own notes. Talk about the ultimate outline. Sure, it could get out of hand, but like I said, the potential is incredible.
Oh, it's also a blogging tool. That's cool, too, especially the fact that it doesn't use a web interface to control the blog and the way it's so easy to create new posts -- just hit return! However, the coolness will be limited until you have more control over where you host your stuff. It's also based on the same back end that Radio Userland was built on, so it works the same way—a mini-server on your desktop. That's obviously got its own pros and cons, but I think the pros are bigger.
p.s.: I am thrilled there's now a Mac version of this tool. The dock icon for the Mac version of the outliner totally blows, though.
Ambits Is Back!
Since the last redesign of the imbroglio I've been missing the ambivalent bits sidebar from the old design. Ambits provided a way for me to point readers to interesting things I'd noticed around the web but which I didn't have time or desire to make the subject of a regular post. The only problem was: No one seemed to read it.
Now, thanks to Andrew Raff and his link to this terrific Hit Or Miss tutorial, ambits is back—and better than ever! Now, instead of being relegated to a sidebar that no one reads, each day's bits will appear at the top of that day's blog entry in this main column so you can't miss them. (I thought they might also appear in the RSS feed, but I guess not. Sorry.) The bits are offset by being slightly indented, smaller, and on a light grey background. There you'll find links to random things I find interesting or entertaining. Generally the bits will consist of the headline or title of whatever I'm linking to, plus the most important, pithy, or memorable sentence in that piece. If you see something in italics, that's my own commentary on the link. Enjoy!
Posted 05:34 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
This Is No Modern Romance, Spam Edition
Hi. Could it be? Almost two weeks without a post?
I apologize for being away for so long. As I mentioned the other day in a comment, our trip was a bit more adventurous than we'd planned or expected and it's taken a bit more time than I thought to get back into the usual ebb and flow around here. Long story short, our car broke down on the way home from Michigan and we rashly decided just to buy a new one rather than fix it. So L. and I are now the ambivalent owners of a brand spanking new, 2005, “sunburst orange metallic” Chevy Cobalt sedan. She likes it because it's orange. I like it because it has cruise control. Yay! We spent nearly 8 solid hours trying to get the stupid thing inspected and registered today. Not yay.
But there will be time for more about that later, especially over at ambivalent images where you will soon find plenty of pictures, I hope. For now, part of the catching up comes from the fact that I was greeted upon my return with a big steaming pile off spam spam spam! Apparently, this and other sites on our shared server have been getting attacked w/so much spam it's been shutting the server down. This led to intermittent disabling of comments, and that might happen again. It also means the server seems glacially slow (at least from my end). And worst of all, Blawg Wisdom appears to be hosed in a completely mystifying way.
So, I apologize for all of that, and I hope to have everything back to normal ASAP. If anyone has any ideas for good spam control on MT (yeah, right) or if you understand what that stupid “parse error” is when you load up the Blawg Wisdom home page, please let me know. As far as spam control goes, we've checked out the spam guide and we're already using MT-Blacklist, MT-DSBL, and we've turned off commenting on some older entries. The next step may be a captcha, but I'm certainly open to suggestions.
Posted 04:06 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
Hearsay Exception: Blawgcoop Throttled!
In a first, Dreamhost, my host for this domain, blawgcoop.com, and others, sent me an email today that said in part:
This is just to let you know that per your request, we have now “throttled” your domain blawgcoop.com.
I was sort of expecting that, since earlier I'd noticed a certain Hearsay Exceptions Movie was getting a lot of hits. It turns out someone named “Will” at MSNBC found it interesting (scroll down a bit), and apparently, lots of people follow links from Will's site. Will was kind enough to link to another version of the movie hosted elsewhere, and after a bit of adjustment, things are now back to normal. (I had the “throttle” threshold set pretty low and simply raised it to accommodate the extra traffic.)
For the record, this cool movie originated with Energy Spatula—one of her classmates made it for evidence class and was kind enough to share it with her, then I posted it on Blawgcoop because she wasn't sure where to host it. I'm telling you, this guy should make a whole series of Law Schoolhouse Rock videos! His audience wants more!
Being the geek that I am, I only hope that someday I will create something remarkable enough to shut down this website. You know you might be a web geek when...
Posted 10:32 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
I'm Just, um, Catching Up
So what happens when you post to your blog nearly every day for a while and then suddenly stop for a few days with no good explanation? Apparently you get amusing email like this:
The only joy I get all week is to read your blog and natalie dee every morning and Gene Weingarten and Tom Sietsema's chats once a week. The rest of my time is spent giving birth—trying to learn things I didn't learn the first 1 billion times I tried, like con law. Don't give me excuses like that you are busy “helping people” and trying to make this world “better” by protecting people's “rights.” Just write thoughtful, insightful and clever shit every day. OK? And post it nice and early so I can read it during barbri.
Don't you just love it? I need more friends like this. Now that it's summer and I find myself living in a steam table.... oh, and since my days are a little longer than they are during the school year, well.... it's not that I don't want to post so much as there's just not always time. But hey, for you? I'll see what I can do. Thoughtful, insightful, and clever I'm not so sure about, but if all you're looking for is something more interesting than BarBri, that's a much smaller order and one I think I can fill. I'll try, anyway.
Ten things:
- Blawg Wisdom has a new request for advice and a new Books category, both waiting for your generous and inspired commentary and input.
- Dave! has picked up and run with the weekly law student blog roundup ball with a short but sweet snapshot of what's happening recently. Thanks to Dave!, this feature should be moving to Blawg Wisdom soon.
- Energy Spatula is back in D.C. and she's already causing trouble. Welcome to town, ES!
- Feeding my Mac obsession: Are Apple and Intel really going for broke against Microsoft?
- And my political obsession: People love to bash Howard Dean but how can you not love stuff like this: “My view is that Fox News is a propaganda outlet of the Republican Party and that I don't comment on Fox News.”
- “Either you repeat the same conventional doctrines everybody else is spouting, or else you say something true, and it will sound like it's from Neptune.” --Noam Chomsky
- PledgeBank: Raise money for something you care about.
- ConnectviaBooks: Make friends with people who like the same books you like? Hmm.
- Chicago Crime: A freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago. What a cool use of Google maps.
- My thumb hurts.
Posted 06:42 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Marathon, Whitman-Walker, and Ads on ai
Hi. I am currently training with the AIDS Marathon Training Program to run the Marine Corps Marathon this October. Participants in the program each raise at least $1700 in donations for the Whitman-Walker Clinic in D.C. The clinic provides comprehensive medical services to the D.C. community, and is especially committed to ending the suffering of all those infected and affected by HIV/AIDS. Your donation will help ensure the clinic can continue to provide its vital services to the D.C. community. To get an idea of how important those services are, check out this startling fact: D.C. has the highest per-capita incidence of HIV/AIDS in the nation! (More from the CDC.)
If you have ever wished you could do something nice for the Imbroglio (because, well, why wouldn't you wish that?), or if you would like to help out the Whitman-Walker clinic, or both, please make a donation today. Thanks!
About the [nevermind. This has been edited to comply with commercial restrictions]. help me meet my $1700 fundraising goal.
Posted 09:26 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Welcome to ai Version 3.0
And just like that, the imbroglio is all fresh and new. The biggest changes are obviously to the banner and the move back from two to three columns. Long-time readers might recall that the original imbroglio was a rust-colored three-column design, so this is something of a return to the imbroglio's roots. The banner is another story. I've already received feedback that the blue bar behind the title should go all the way to the top of the page. Does anyone else think that would be a better look?
Aesthetics aside, the purpose of this redesign was twofold. First, I was just tired of the old look. It's nice to shake things up once in a while. I wanted something simpler, cleaner, perhaps easier to maintain. To that end the new page is missing several of the sidebar features readers said they weren't even aware of or rarely read. These include the ambivalent bits links blog which was fun for me but for few others, apparently. I'm planning to incorporate links like that elsewhere, or perhaps restart the feature if I find I miss it. Other missing “features” include ambivalent comment (which I'd never fully implemented anyway), the audioscrobbler recently played tracks sidebar, and the ambivalent voices sidebar. Again, some of these may see new life someday, but for now it's nice to have a slightly simpler page. There's obviously still a lot of content packed into this page—too much, some might say. What's here is useful to me, and I hope you find it so, as well.
The other main reason for the redesign was the marathon I'm training for. You may notice that the right column is dominated by a request for support in this endeavor. I have no idea if it will lead to anything, but I figured it was worth a shot. I played with the idea of placing some Google ads on the page to generate marathon money, but then I read here that I probably wouldn't make more than $1-2/week and I decided it just wasn't worth it. My intention is not to offend anyone by asking for money, but to make it easy for anyone who might desire to donate to do so. It's a terrific cause and all donations are tax deductible! I'll be writing more about this as the summer progresses, but anything you can spare will be a great help, both to me in my own fundraising goal, and more importantly, to the important work of the Whitman-Walker Clinic.
I think that's about it other than to note that this redesign took far longer than I expected. The technical work involved is not so great, but I think there's a psychological hump to get over when you're planning to reformat thousands of pages in one fell swoop.
For those of you reading the RSS feed, please click on through and tell me what you think. For those of you viewing the actual page, well, what do you think? Love it? Hate it? All feedback is welcome. I aim to please so if anything does not appear to be working or if anything is hard to read or difficult to understand for some reason, please let me know.
Posted 09:39 PM | Comments (20)
Redesign in Progress
Just a quick warning that I'm about to update the templates on this site. If things get very funky, this is why.
Change is good, right?
Posted 08:09 PM
Black Background Blogs
In my ongoing but sporadic and completely self-serving series of polite and humble requests to bloggers everywhere: If your blog has a black background behind light text, can you please please reverse that? The light text on black (or other really dark color) background is very hard to read. If you'd like a black background, why not put that background around all the margins but keep the background on the main column of text light? That's what I've done here at the imbroglio and many other bloggers have done the same. It's just much easier on the eyes and is therefore more reader-friendly. You want to be friends with your readers, don't you?
Thanks.
Other posts in this series:
Posted 07:29 PM
Blawg Wisdom Needs You
Blawg Wisdom has been updated with a new request for advice about choosing between Loyola and Southwestern law schools. Please head on over and offer any tips you can think of, either about those schools specifically, or making the choice more generally.
Unfortunately, this is the first update to Blawg Wisdom in weeks. I frequently come across posts I think would make good links there but then I forget where I saw them before I have time to post them. Plus, I just don't have the blog-reading time I once did. Bottom line: I can't find all the good “wisdom” about law school on my own.
So: Would anyone like to help keep Blawg Wisdom more up to date? I envision a handful of people posting occasionally when they come across links they think would be helpful to other law students. If I post twice a month, and two or three other post twice a month, the site will be a bit more active and useful for everyone. Ideally we could get volunteers from different places in law school—pre-law, 1L, 2L, 3L, maybe even a recent grad or two. Your interests change as you go through the process so it would be good to have a representative from each step along the way.
Volunteers?
Posted 06:51 AM | Comments (6)
When you don't have time to read or write you make lists
- These tape men are awesome.
- Blawg Review #7 is up and good. Mr. Richey did a great job frontin' for blawg students everywhere. Thanks JR!
- Blawg Review #6 also looked really good, although I still haven't been able to read most of it. Working 40 hrs/week and commuting an additional 10 has a way of seriously cutting down on surf-time.
- This Rojo thing looks like a possibly cool replacement for del.icio.us—sort of like del.icio.us on steroids. Anyone tried it?
- Legal Lies at Stay of Execution is a must-read for law students and future law students, although I haven't yet read it. It has made f/k/a unhappy, but really, I have no idea what they're talking about. Do you think I should read the things I link to?
- At first blush (and again, I haven't read much about it), this fillibuster deal seems like a big fat loser for Democrats because doesn't it basically mean they're going to have to confirm the nominees they previously blocked? Doesn't it give the Republicans almost everything they wanted (up/down votes on nominees) while giving Dems almost nothing? What am I missing?
- I learned a new word yesterday:
asportation |ˌaspərˈtā sh ən| noun Law, rare
the detachment, movement, or carrying away of property, considered an essential component of the crime of larceny.
ORIGIN late 15th cent.: from Latin asportation-, from asportare ‘carry away.’
It strikes me as a rather odd word. Doesn't it seem like it should also be a verb? “My car was asportated” is rather simple, but as a noun I guess you'd have to say “Someone has committed asportation of my car.” Strange.
- I have a strong preference against links that open in new windows. I have a variety of options when I click a link—open in new window, new tab, or in the same window—but web authors who set their links with a “new window” target play a power game in which they attempt to manipulate the choice I make on that click. Don't these hatas know I will always win!?
Posted 07:04 AM | Comments (11)
Effects ripple outward
Following up on my comments from the other day, Evan Schaeffer has offered a more complete explanation of the changes he's making to his blog in the comments here. One of the things he's changing is he's getting rid of what was my favorite part of the his site—the weekly law student blog roundup. Someone needs to take that over. It was not just a great weekend read, it was a public service. Who's in?
Posted 06:27 AM | Comments (6)
Law-Related Things That Suck: When Lawyers and Law Students Stop Blogging
According to this podcast, the comments there, and this post, Notes from the (Legal) Underground is no more. Instead, it's going to be called Evan Schaeffer's Legal Underground and “is going to come to an abrupt halt.” It's unclear what this means. Evan has promised to explain, but for now it seems that the Legal Underground as we've known and loved it is no more.
Why? Evan has apparently seen evidence that becoming a popular blogger can actually hurt a lawyer's business. That news is itself almost as sad as hearing that the Legal Underground may no longer be the fun and happening place we've all come to know and love. It makes me wonder: What the heck do people want from lawyers, anyway? Lawyers are criticized for being stuffy, bloodthirsty sharks. Then, if they show a more human or friendly side, they get criticized (via lost business) for not being stuffy bloodthirsty sharks? I just don't get it.
Along with all the talk recently of why law students shouldn't blog summer jobs, the bad news about law blogging just keeps rolling in. Oh, and now this: Blonde Justice notes that Soupie's BBQ Daycare has gone fishing for the summer.
I guess it's good that I've started my job and don't have much time to read (or write) blogs anymore, huh?
Posted 06:57 AM | Comments (6)
Happy Birthday Blonde Justice (and more!)
Happy Birthday to Blonde Justice (the blawg), which is one whole year old today!:
Blondie is probably watching the big Survivor finale right now, and I'm headed there soon, too. (The magic of Tivo means I generally start watching about 20-30 minutes into a network program so that I can then skip through the commercials.) What big surprises are in store? It's supposed to be television like you've never seen it before! Oh my gosh, I can hardly wait!
Really, after such a great season of the Amazing Race, Survivor has had a hard time keeping up. It's gotten better recently, so tonight could be good, but I'm not holding my breath.
It's been quiet around here recently as I worked on a little freelance project which is now mostly finished. Work starts tomorrow. I'm looking forward to it, but it's also been nice having a bit of freedom the last few days. More on all that soon.
Posted 08:38 PM | Comments (3)
Help Redesign the Imbroglio!
Dear readers: As I just mentioned, I'm hoping to redesign this site very soon. I'm thinking clean and simple is the way to go, but I'm still not really sure how to accomplish that.
Therefore, I'm asking for your help. Please let me know what bugs you about this page, or what you particularly like, what you don't like, what you never look at, what you look at every day, what you've never understood, what you think is necessary/unnecessary/missing, etc.
In addition to that general call for whatever is on your mind, I have some specific questions:
- Do you ever read or click through the bits? Do you ever wish you could comment or trackback to them? Would you miss them if they were gone? Do you think they are pointless? Are you ambivalent about bits?
- What about the comment sidebar? Do you ever check that out? It actually doesn't work correctly, and I realize that. I see it as more of a way for me to keep track of conversations I'm participating in, but it wouldn't really need to appear on this page to accomplish that goal.
- Have you ever transmogrified ai? By that I mean, have you ever used the little drop-down menu at the upper-right to change the default stylesheet for this page? Again, do you like that “feature”? Would you miss it if it were gone?
- Column widths: Are the widths for the text too wide or too narrow, as far as you're concerned? I am often bothered by columns of text that are on one extreme or the other; I mostly think there's a good balance here with the main column of blog posts and the sidebar, but, well, I could be wrong. Plus, most of you browse via IE and that might make everything look different.
- What do you think of 3-column layouts? If you prefer 2-columns, do you prefer sidebars on left or right?
- Do you read the RSS feed for this page, and if so, how often do you click through to the main page? I'm thinking if the majority of readers are moving to RSS-only, there's not much need to make this page visually interesting, is there?
And be honest. I'm pretty tired of this “look,” so you won't hurt my feelings, I promise.
Posted 11:09 PM | Comments (13)
Feed me, please
All right kind peeps, I need to ask a small favor. Can you feed me, please? By that I mean: Can you make sure your blog produces an RSS or Atom feed so that lazy yahoos like me can read all our favorite sites in a feed reader (aka, “aggregator)? Whadya say?
If you don't know what I'm talking about with all this ”feed“ business, please see this introduction to RSS. If you use Blogger and you don't know how to create a feed for your blog, here's what you need to do: Go to your ”Settings“ tab and click the ”site feed“ subtab. Say ”yes“ to publish site feed, and make descriptions ”full.“ Click Save Settings and rejoice! You have now fed me and all your other adoring fans!
For those of you using Xanga, well, um, I don't think Xanga will produce feeds b/c it looks like the whole theory of Xanga is to keep people inside of Xanga. (I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like.) So may I suggest something like Feedburner? It should create a feed for you w/out too much trouble.
It would make me most highly pleased if the following blogs had feeds:
- Buzzwords
- I'm a PD
- Mister District Attorney
- Blonde Justice
- WonL
- Woman of the Law
- Crim Law
- Injustice for All
p.s.: If anyone has more tips or tricks to make it easy for people to make sure their blogs have a feed, please share.
Posted 11:42 PM | Comments (20)
Say Hello to Blawg Review!
Blawg Review, the new “carnival of the blawgs,” has just published its very first edition, hosted by Notes from the (Legal) Underground. This inaugural installment features dozens of great posts from lawyers, law students, and law professors, and covers a vast range of topics from cybersquatting to cookie monster to breastfeeding to billable hours—and more. Definitely some great reads there. If you haven't yet heard, Blawg Review is sort of a peer-edited collection of the self-nominated “best” that the blawg world has to offer each week. Or, as George's Employment Blawg put it, Blawg Review is about “making the best of the blawgosphere more accessible and enjoyable to read.” Blawgers nominate their own posts for inclusion (although I suppose you could always nominate someone else's posts, couldn't you?), then the “host” editor decides what to include in each week's review and organizes and presents those posts in whatever way he/she sees fit. The host changes each week, which means the style and emphasis of the review will probably change a little each week, as well. It's a neat idea, and will most definitely be worth checking in on each Monday (especially, ahem, on September 5th for the back-to-school edition, and September 29th for the I-don't-know-what edition). And, as the editors have frequently emphasized, the review will only be as good as the material that gets submitted, so keep that in mind as you post in the future and be sure to forward your best or favorite stuff (or, I suppose, stuff you'd just like to get before a wider audience) to Blawg Review, following the simple submission guidelines. Congratulations to Blawg Review on a great start!Posted 09:17 AM
Washington Lawyer: Do You Blog?
The Washington Lawyer's April cover story is entitled “Do You Blog?” Well, do you? The article was written by Sarah Kellogg and covers everything from the birth of blogs and RSS to the benefits and perils of professionals publishing online. It's a great article, but it would have been even better if it would have provided links to to all of the many blogs it mentions.* In case you'd like to check out the blogs mentioned in the article, they include:- Bag and Baggage by Denise Howell
- CrimLaw by Ken Lammers
- Fourth Amendment by John Wesley Hall, Jr.
- May It Please the Court by J. Craig Williams
- The Blawg Review by Stephanie Tai (not to be confused with, um, Blawg Review
- My Shingle by Carolyn Elefant
- Dennis Kennedy's blog (Kennedy calls Kellogg's article the best article he's read on blawging)
- The Trademark Blog by Martin Schwimmer
- SCOTUSBlog from Goldstein Howe
- Ernie the Attorney by Ernest Svenson
- The Statutory Construction Zone by Gary O’Connor
- Environmental Law Net (which seems to stretch the definition of “blog” a bit, it seems)
- Underneath Their Robes by Article III Groupie
- Blawg Wisdom, which links to content from many law students and legal practitioners
- Reid My Blawg! by Reid Trautz
- And several others that are linked at the end of the piece...
Posted 07:51 AM | Comments (2)
Blogroll Update
Just a note about a few tweaks around the Imbroglio: A revised about page, a search box that works better, I think (instead of returning crazy looking results from every blog on the system, it should now use a standard template and confine its searches to ambivalent areas), and a revised blog roll. As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I used to use Blogrolling.com for my blogroll, and that was awesome, but to no one's surprise, it's no longer free. So I switched to trying to use del.icio.us to manage the links, and that works, except that you apparently can't get more than, like, 31 links to display in a list, and that just wasn't pleasant. Enter MT-Blogroll, a new MT plugin that helps you manage your blogrolls, allowing a different roll for each blogg, categories and minimal metadata for each link, and blogrolling via book mark (click a bookmark to add a link to your roll). So it does just about everything Blogrolling did, but it's free and it runs on your own server so the price should never go up. Cool. So now the roll includes several short lists of categorized blogs, including those that focus on criminal law (the “CrimBlawgs”), since that's what I'm trying to focus more on. This category includes blogs by public defenders, prosecutors, professors of crimlaw, and students who have noted at some point that they think they want to do crimlaw. If you see that your blog is miscategorized, please let me know and I'll change it. “The Roll” at the bottom of the links is just that—the long list of blogs I like and which I would visit daily if I had the time. Some of them I do visit daily or regularly, others less regularly, but they're all worth visiting so they're there for when I have a free moment. Also, some are missing. Some blogs I visit so often I've forgotten to blogroll them—I just always type in the URL. I'll try to notice these and add them to the list. That's more than anyone wanted to know, but I'm procrastinating, so...Posted 10:50 AM | Comments (5)
Ambivalent Images Turns One
The daily snapshot site, ambivalent images, started a year ago today with a photo of a red beetle. 365 photos later, it's still going strong. Although it's never received a great deal of traffic, I still enjoy taking and posting photos. I hope you've enjoyed a few of them, as well. When I started the project, I had no idea whether I'd be able to continue it for even a few months, let alone a year, but it has been so fun and so much less work than I anticipated that it almost seems to run itself now. A selection of favorite shots—one from each month of the last year:- RDB Chewbacca
- Sisu
- Gargoyle View
- Cicada
- Sunflower
- Happy Dog
- Woodley Park Metro
- Indian Corn
- Veteran's Day 2004
- Super Scrabble
- Cold Hard Truth
- Looking Up
Posted 10:15 AM | Comments (5)
She's Back!
Hooray! Ditzy Genius has escaped her evil squirrel prison!!! Get on over and welcome her back to the wacky world of these funny little electronic blawg things! Oh, and she made the law review editorial board, as well, so: Congratulations and Welcome Back, DG!Posted 10:10 PM
Best Simple Browser Shortcut Ever
I don't know where I read this, and it's probably not news to most people, but if you don't know about it and you use a web browser, you're missing out. What is it? Command-L. (Control-L on Windows. Or is it Alt-L? I can never remember.) Command-L is a keyboard shortcut in almost every browser (including Firefox, Safari, and Explorer) that moves the cursor to the browser's address bar and selects everything it finds there. This is incredibly handy when you're finished reading a page and know where you want to go next—just hit Command-L and start typing your next destination. It also makes it simple to copy a URL. For example, if you're creating a blog post and want to link to something you can:- hit command-L (to select the URL in the address bar),
- command-c (to copy the URL),
- command-tab (to switch from browser to ecto or whatever desktop blogging client you use), and
- command-v (to paste the URL).
Posted 01:57 PM
When Blogs Do Good
Changing the tone but continuing the discussion of how blogs are changing the media landscape, the accountability of public figures, and more, Peggy Noonan makes a convincing case in support of blogs as a positive force in public discourse. [link via Scripting News] To briefly summarize, she argues that one of the main advantages bloggers have over traditional journalists is that they are free to write about whatever they want, whenever they want, for as long as they want, etc., allowing them to cover things in greater depth and with greater persistence and tenacity and candor than professional journalism allows. This is how blogs can make the invisible visible, and keep it that way, and I agree that this is a huge public service. Noonan also argues that the best journalists have been those who have learned their craft from experience rather than through formal “training” or education, so they've got nothing on bloggers there. Meanwhile, she suggests that the blogosphere uses peer review and an economy of status and respect to take care of the “fact-checking” or “ethical-checking” function that editors provide to professional journalists—if you're an unethical or untrustworthy blogger, no one's going to respect or read you, so you'll just disappear. There's more worth saying about this, but I've got to run so maybe later... See also: Thoughts on this from a j-school professor [also via Scripting News].Posted 08:54 AM
“Blawg” & Blawg Republic
I learned yesterday that Denise Howell of Bag and Baggage coined the word “blawg” in the sense of “legal-related blog.” Since I use the word all the time now and made such a big (sort of) deal about it in this article, I wanted to give credit where it's due. I know some people do not find the word helpful, and it becomes less useful if you're speaking rather than writing, but I obviously think it's a great contraction in a web-writing context, so thank you, Denise. And speaking of blawg, have you seen Blawg Republic? Is your blawg listed there? This one isn't, but I'm wondering why Blawg Wisdom is listed under “Law Professors”. I mean, it would be nice if I were a law professor, or if professors wanted to contribute more to the advice on the site, but....Posted 06:24 AM | Comments (3)
Goodbye Blogrolling, Hello Del.icio.us (maybe)
When Tucows bought Blogrolling.com last year, everyone figured the days of free were over. I was pleasantly surprised when nothing on my account seemed to change. However, I just got a message from Blogrolling telling me I'll need to pay $20/year from now on to use the service at my current level (I have 10 blogrolls, although I only actually use about four). Um, no. The links in the sidebar (“ambivalent links”) are now coming courtesy of the del.icio.us bookmark manager. (Thanks to the RSSfeed plugin and these tips from MovableBlog.) What you see here is only a selection; it's supposed to be the links I try to visit daily, or as often as possible. Unfortunately, it appears that del.icio.us is truncating the feed. The list should contain about 4o links, but only 31 are showing up in the feed. If you understand these things and can tell me if there's a way to make del.icio.us send the whole list, please let me know. At any rate, the current list includes a few blawgs, a few blogs, a couple of news sources, and a few photoblogs. Ironically, many of the sites I visit most frequently are actually not on this list b/c I visit them directly (by typing in the URL) instead of relying on a link list to get me to my destination. As I discover more of these, I'll add them to the del.icio.us list. The new sidebar also contains separate sections for GW blawgs and Blawgcoop blawgs (obviously), all of which I try to visit on a regular basis, as well. If you miss some of the additional links that have long appeared in the “ambivalent links” sidebar on this page, you'll probably find what you're looking for on my del.icio.us page under the tags blawg or blog. If you'd like to narrow further in the law-related category, or if you'd just prefer to surf links that are all of one type (all blawgs by law students, for example), lawstudent, attorney, and professor are all subcategories of “blawg.” If you're not yet familiar w/del.icio.us, it's a bookmark service that allows you to save bookmarks and “tag” them with keywords so you can find them later and so all similar content can be grouped together. It's also a social networking tool because in addition to your own links, you can see all the links all other users have tagged with the same keywords, or you can see all the other users who have bookmarked a certain page. It's cool. It's free. And considered as a replacement for Blogrolling.com, it's even more useful b/c it makes it even easier to add, sort, and display URLs, which were all the reasons I liked Blogrolling in the first place. Of course, if del.icio.us won't send the full feed, it's not really going to do what I want, so I may have to look for a new blogroll solution. Any suggestions?Posted 07:44 AM | Comments (2)
When Blogs Do Bad II
Following up on the Eason Jordon story and the question of whether the ability of blogs to “take down” public figures is a positive development, I would be remiss if I didn't mention the recent unmasking of Jeff Gannon. Gannon was a highly partisan reporter who used a pseudonym and somehow gained a seat in the White House press corp where he asked questions with lots of Republican spin. Gannon may or may not have also been leading a somewhat salacious double life. Salon's coverage. So now we can add Gannongate to Easongate and Rathergate. Salon's “War Room” covers them all with lots of good links to more. As I said before, the ability of blogs to hold public figures accountable is a good thing, but it's one thing to uncover what's hidden, and another to destroy careers or lives. Maybe the destruction follows automatically from the uncovering, and maybe that's not the fault of bloggers. However, when prominent people make questionable statements or do questionable things, wouldn't we be better of as a society if we could learn from their mistakes instead of simply destroying the mistake-maker? UPDATE: See also:- Closing Thoughts on the Resignation of Eason Jordon
- Comments on the aftermath from Jeff Jarvis
- A theory that Jordon got fired for basically doing what bloggers do: Speaking candidly.
Posted 07:59 AM | Comments (8)
All Hail Slapcast
So you've probably head about this “podcasting” thing, and now that Notes from the (Legal) Underground and Jeremy Richey are getting into it, I thought I'd give it a try. And while creating podcasts sounds like it could be very complicated, thanks to Slapcast.com, all you need is a phone! Here's all you need to do:- Create a free account at Slapcast.com.
- Call an 800-number and leave a message (up to 5 minutes).
- Log in and enter the phone number you called from. Slapcast finds your recording via caller-id.
- Give your recording a title and write some comments about it if you want.
- Publish your recording (or Slapcast can just do that automatically).
Posted 11:07 AM | Comments (4)