I'm looking forward to the Podcast and Portable Media Expo again this year — last year sizzled, this year is bound to combust. In addition to co-moderating the legal workshop there with Colette Vogele and Jeff Heninger/Heninger, I'm thrilled to have been asked to lead a session at Podcast Academy 4 just before the PME kicks off. Hope to see you at one or both of these great events.

It was great to finally meet Andy Plesser of Beet.TV at AlwaysOn. He has a whole bunch of interviews from the event:

• YouTube's Chad Hurley is Not Worried about Microsoft
• 10,000 Companies Use Facebook, Co-Founder Tells Beet.TV
• Silicon Valley Is Roaring Back with Real Opportunity, Not the Hype of the Bubble, Says Veteran Publisher and Valley Visionary Tony Perkins
• Visionary Robert Scoble Readys New Internet TV Show to Launch in September - Interview Approach 'Like Charlie Rose'
• 'Videoblogging Is the Damnest Thing!' Declares Technorati's Peter Hirshberg

Professor Shaun Martin at the University of San Diego School of Law writes: "Pretty interesting when a fairly substantial portion of your dissent entails a block quote from a blawg. As Judge O'Scannlain — joined by four others — does here." [Via Kim Kralowec]

Harper v. Poway Unified School Dist. (9th Cir. - July 31, 2006) | digg story

Ownit offers free IP news and advice geared toward London's creative community.

And Blawg Review, your free weekly guide to the blawgospheric highlights, is served up this week by Jeremy Blachman (and friend/Frankenstein).

It's so good to be home after two weeks on the road. Just uploaded pics from AlwaysOn and Vasona Park.

Julie Fleming Brown has a thoughtful and incisive post on the work-life balance considerations discussed here recently. Read the whole thing, particularly the part beginning with:

It seems to me that when work/life balance is discussed, the conversation is very often preceded by an internal eye-rolling, a deep sigh, and the thought, 'here we go again, another lawyer who isn't willing to work hard and who just wants a free and easy ride to the good life.' I think that attitude sells everyone short — the lawyers, the firms, and the clients. . . .

Her bottom line:

I do not think work/life balance is just a fad, nor do I think it signals a decline in lawyer commitment to practice or to client service. I think it's a call for more transparency in practice expectations on the part of both lawyers and their law firms, and a call for lawyers to pay closer attention to what they want in their careers and in their lives.

People sometimes ask if I think blawgs will take the place of law journals. Eventually, something like them, sure. For now, at least one law journal is writing about blawgs, publishing blawgers, and writing its own blawg.

How are Blogs Affecting the Legal World?, Volume 11 of the NeXus Journal. (Thanks Tom, for the heads up it's now online.)

They're bound to interview you and post it on the Web. Go watch newly retained Ourmedia counsel Colette Vogele as interviewed by birthday boy JD Lasica.

(Actually, both are funny.)

Jeff Schwartz of Disruptive Strategies, on Steve Gillmor: "Steve is like Jerry Garcia, except he plays the brain instead of the guitar."

Marty Schwimmer illuminates "a common pattern of how the blogosphere puzzles out contractual terms".

Edward Fitzpatrick at The Rhode Island Journal, 3 in R.I. charged with online piracy: "In all, the Recording Industry Association of America has sued at least 108 Rhode Islanders and more than 18,000 people nationwide since September 2003." Say all those suits were to settle for somewhere in the neighborhood of $5,000 — that's $90 million. Related, BoingBoing on RIAA insurance.

[Update:] One can only hope experimentation proves more reliably profitable.

[Update:] EFF, Frequently Awkward Questions for the Entertainment Industry: "The RIAA has sued over 20,000 music fans for file sharing, who have on average paid a $3,750 settlement. That's over $75,000,000." [via P2P File Sharing]

From Peter Hirschberg's keynote:

There's also an incredible "MLAA" clip, but I can't find it!! Will try. [Update:] Dave Sifry advises that one's a Peter Hirschberg original, not yet uploaded; stay tuned.

Renee Blodgett's; flickr.

Salesforce's Marc Benioff (after determining that 60% of the audience used Yahoo!, Gmail, etc. for their personal email but still Outlook, etc. at work), on Exchange Server, Lotus Notes, and other commonly used enterprise email platforms: "It's the worst piece of technology in the whole industry!" Oh wow, I had no idea this was out there: Gmail for your domain. (Note it's on a secure server.)

Discussing various key aspects of Web services/software as a service*:

• Transparency: see trust.salesforce.com [Update:] In the later related panel: "At Oracle we didn't have a 'trust' page — we had an F.U. page! [audience laughs] I'm not kidding!!"
• Mashups: see Bikramfinder (a Salesforce client)

*[Update:] Dan Farber captured all 10 factors.

• Marty Schwimmer: "[T]hat a policing 'bot (or human supervision thereof) should be empowered to take down the site for 40 hours - that's of some concern."
• Ed.: "Raff may be breaking new ground for lawyers, riffing on MySpace, but as bloggers of his generation go he's not atypical." And the corollary: "Good thing he knows his way around Internet law."

• Bruce Boyden: "[T]his interesting article (sub. req.) appeared in the New York Law Journal..."
• Hastings' Project for Attorney Retention (PAR): "We're revamping 'The Scoop' — a treasure trove of information about what it is really like to work a flexible schedule at particular firms."
• Justin Patten: "[W]ith some exceptions[,] cutting-edge creative lawyers DO NOT have a place in mainstream law firms."

In Blawg Review #67 David Fischer also thought these were worth checking out, and has more.

Jeneane Sessum sends word of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's Women make themselves heard through blogs, on women, blogging, and BlogHer (later this week). It's a nice piece that aptly highlights Jeneane's seminal role and contributions to the blogging community.

This is the first event I've been to in years (maybe ever) where I'm not toting business cards. The oral alternative seems to work just fine: "Google my first name, I'm the one who was never married to Charlie Sheen."

Here again is the address for the live webcast and chat. Go get in the chat room, it's onscreen in real time for the audience and speakers here. I'm just catching the last few minutes of this panel, but it's a good one: Kara Swisher moderating Michael Arrieta (SVP Sony Pictures Digital Sales and Marketing), Dave Goldberg (head of Yahoo! music), Chad Hurley (CEO YouTube), and Michael Robertson (once of MP3.com; now CEO MP3Tunes).

Shock and awe: YouTube is presently serving up 100,000,000 videos per day.

Intention economy: Kara Swisher mentioned in passing that at Google they can tell weeks in advance which Hollywood films will be hits once released, and which won't.

Sony's Arrieta discusses mashups, leveraging and harnessing the marketing power of fan/user creativity, and getting ahead of the copyright issues. Says Sony will go through the hurdles to ensure that user remixing isn't infringing. It'd be nice to see the licensing and parameters of that. [Update:] In a brief conversation after the panel, Michael told me Sony has been experimenting with this since 2001 and suggested I call him to talk more with Sony legal about it. I'll see if I can get someone to elaborate.

Michael Robertson mentioned Eyespot: Ajax-based online video editing and sharing. Looks cool.

JD Lasica asks Chad Hurley about the role of other video sites than YouTube. Chad says people upload to YouTube for the viewership and network effect, but there are plenty of roles for other sites filling other niches.

[Update:] Here's Dan Farber's excellent coverage.

Greetings from beautiful, sweltering Stanford, CA.

If you're reading this at 6:20 p.m. PDT or so, you should follow along with the AO Live Webcast. Here's what will be going on at AlwaysOn. I'll be updating this post intermittently throughout the evening.

John Hennessy (President, Stanford University)

Tom Byers asks Stanford's president about the role of universities in solving society's most difficult problems. Universities are home to "the most creative people in the world:" graduate students. "They're the doers. They're the people who don't see the inhibitions to innovation."

AO 100

Key themes for this year's list: consumers (entertainment, information, socializing), mobile. Many familar names, old friends even, including Technorati and CafePress. Alex Welch of Photobucket accepted the Top Newcomer award, and Gurbaksh Chahal, CEO of Blue Lithium, accepted the Top Innovator award.

"The Computer Is Personal Again"

Todd Bradley of HP. HP has an ad campaign focused on achievers who use technology to drive the way they work and play:

"The millenial generation is generating its own content." Stat: among 21-year olds, 61% of Web use is to access material created by someone they know. Kids know: "Which is more fun, Internet or TV?" "Internet!!!" HP is orienting its focus around enabling storytellers to tell better stories.

Fireside Chat

Ed Leonard of DreamWorks, Todd Bradley of HP, moderated by Al Delattre, Global Managing Director at Accenture. Barriers to entry for creation continue to plunge, according to Ed Leonard: "The stuff that our animators are running to do Over The Hedge is the same stuff you can buy from HP.com."

Steve Martin used to toss a line into his routine when he spaced out, something like: "Oops, went to the Bahamas there, just for a moment." I've always wanted to know what he meant, and now I do, six days there having gone by in precisely the blink of one eye. This was a family trip over a year in the planning in honor of my mother-in-law's 60th. I'd torture you with photos but my camera refused to leave and is still bumming around Nassau somewhere (I do have some hope it will make its way home, we'll see). In the meantime, the Exumas tag at Flickr will do nicely; I think we met this very pig. [Update: yay, the wayward camera turned up.]

Huge, huge thanks to all who offered kind or thought provoking sentiments in response to my last post; I'm still pondering these in particular.

The only "media" (if that's the appropriate term; maybe I should just say "non-blog") attention I've seen are these blurbs from thelawyer.com. I'm not very familiar with the publication but I'd encourage you to take its coverage and speculations with a boulder or two of salt. Gently put, the two pieces (the more recent of which is un-bylined) fail to bowl me over as superlative examples the journalist's art. They've botched my name ("Howells"), my position with the firm ("partner"), my notoriety as a blogger ("legendary" — quite an adjective for someone with modest traffic who has come about as close to hitting the Technorati Top 100 as my new Bahamian friend), and the nature of my blogging ("Her blogs have championed the interests of women and mothers in law firms...;" "Howells...has been a leading commentator on work-life balance in law firms" — ??? I've discussed "work-life balance" in exactly one post, mentioned being part time just twice before that, and am far more likely to be blogging about some arcane copyright issue only a technofetishist could love than donning gold llame cuffs and circlet as WonderLawerWoman). So, as always, read critically and skeptically. And, read blogs. I've seen some interesting discussion around my 7/15 post and thus far it has all been in that context.

There's just time for a time zone adjustment and a couple of loads of laundry before heading up to AlwaysOn. Hope to see you there.

There are so many jobs.
Just look and see!
If you could be anything,
What would you be?
—Dora the Explorer, What Will I Be?

Whatchoo gonna do now, Mommeep?
—Tyler Howell

A year ago at just about this time, I was having a conversation with Steve Gillmor. Steve asked me — in so many words, and in his hallmark I-will-brook-no-nonsense-so-don't-even-think-about-it manner — what I was going to be when I grew up. Steve's point, if I understood him correctly, was that there is much to be done in the context of "this big family we find ourselves born into," as he recently put it, and one cannot do it effectively and efficiently by serving two masters and banking on the ability of business-as-usual to piggyback on the inevitability of business-to-come (rather than being usurped by it).

Much has happened in a year. Mike Arrington, who at the same event was as tickled about the promise of his then brand new project as a boy with a brand new dump truck, has become a one man media force and kingmaker/breaker. Video has arrived. Audio has continued to remake all the rules. My son, now 2½, has — as of last week — started sleeping through the night. And Steve's challenge has been on a quiet but insistent loop somewhere just northwest of my epithalamus.

I'm happy to say I'm finally going to answer his question. I'm even more happy to say that while I don't yet know the contours of that answer, whatever they wind up being will involve upending the professional/personal dynamic that has dominated my life for the last two years. Instead of shoehorning my most important job — being a mom — into the discrete chunks of time can be wrested away from the demands of being even a part time lawyer at one of the world's biggest firms, my professional roadmap henceforth will involve only things that are washed through a stringent "how much do I really love that?" filter, and can be comfortably accomplished in the limited, catch-as-catch-can hunks of time that fall serendipitously out of the sky during the course of my other "duties."

Though I'm excited about this change of focus and employment, and might certainly (and perhaps inevitably) have precipitated it on my own at some point, I do want to be clear about one thing: I'm leaving Reed Smith now because I was fired last week. Apparently it's not uncommon for folks who find themselves in this situation to resign notwithstanding the fact they've been fired, in order to be able to hold themselves out as the "break-upper" and not the "break-uppee" during their search for other employment. This kind of fiction seems unnatural to me, not to mention a study in futility and counter to the sort of transparency I've advocated and admired here from the get-go. That said, the contemplated terms of my separation arrangement preclude my discussion of certain nonpublic, firm related matters. So while I'm not going to go into the whats, whys, and hows of my departure, I do have some thoughts on the legal profession and its business realities as I sit here in my home office surrounded by the boxed-up former trappings of my office-building office (which will live on now only as the inspiration for the banner graphic on my about page).

Kristin McGinn-Straub of Frankfurt, Germany (?) chides Vogue Magazine this month about a photo spread involving chic fashion and new motherhood:

I am shocked at this idea of a baby as an accessory. At a time when too many women are having babies and within a matter of weeks popping a bottle into their mouths and trotting them off to day care because the little ones do not meld well with a busy life of self-care and self-interest, this series of photos is simply in bad taste. Babies are not accessories. They are people.

Though Kristin seems to think there is a trend afoot away from active parenting, my own experiences and observations lead me to disagree; I think exactly the opposite is true. However, and certainly in the case of parents who seek to maintain their engagement and investment in careers that represent the sum total of the education and training that has occupied their adult lives, the danger of falling into the trap of relegating, delegating, and too often abdicating the parenting role is all too real. While I know countless lawyers who have done this, and I continue to see people do it, what I more commonly see and hear today (and what undeniably is true in my case) is that people — men and women — are no longer content to adopt such an approach and philosophy; they increasingly discern that the consequences are too dear and potentially too dire. Law firms seem at least to recognize this situation, if their lengthy struggle to address it is any indication. Reed Smith's managing partner Greg Jordan, a phenomenal and visionary individual, will readily tell you: "There's no question that firms need to be flexible and creative to recruit and retain top talent." But firms still have a long way to go before being "flexible and creative" transcends the realm of sound bite and recruiting/retention pitch, and enters that of core value. While some are bound to disagree, my take is that having formalized policies that contemplate part time schedules and family leaves is merely a good start, and cannot and should not be the end of the story. This is because it remains far too common for such programs to precipitate the dead-end — or the actual end — of one's career, rather than leading to an acceptable state of "balance."

Before it can successfully play a role in recruiting and retaining talented people, "work-life balance" has to be more than a buzzword in a firm sponsored Q & A that could readily fuel a Jeremy Blachman parody. To take these sorts of initiatives beyond starting point and sound bite, some simple steps might prove quite helpful:

Neutral Monitoring

I'm usually one of the last to think large firms need more infrastructure, but I'm also usually one of the first to think they need better infrastructure. So, while this might sound like the lead-in to some witty bit of satire or sarcasm, it's not: I'm serious that firms serious about the success of work-life balance should think hard about creating a new C-level position, the CWLBO — Chief Work-Life Balance Officer. It's perhaps tempting to think that workflow management and quality review processes already in place are sufficient to ensure that work-life balance programs do not devolve into interim stops on a person's journey out of a firm or out of the profession. But there are at least three reasons why formally and neutrally monitoring the progress of those who avail themselves of work-life balance programs, and actively fostering their success, makes good sense:

1. People who go part time or on leave in order to be active and engaged parents, or to manage more crisis-triggered personal concerns, are in effect taking on two (or more) demanding jobs where before they had just one. While they may recognize this, they also may fail to appreciate (or may be in denial about) the impact of the new job(s) on the old one. Given the dilatory effects of things like sleep deprivation and stress, just as "work" time becomes more scarce, even those tasks that formerly were straightforward may suddenly become daunting, and — ironically enough — more time consuming than ever. As the parties directly involved struggle to reconcile limitations and expectations, frustration on all fronts mounts until someone decides to end the experiment because "things just aren't working out." A CWLBO could defuse this chain reaction through education, oversight, and intervention.
2. A CWLBO would give work-life balance a warm body instead of a body count. Given adequate authority and resources, in addition to serving his or her primary role the CWLBO would also be a palpable testament to the firm's commitment to these values.
3. Flexibility and creativity require an advocate, and none of the parties directly involved in this process on a day-to-day basis are naturally suited to that role. Part time or leave-taking people are likely to feel they already are imposing on the firm's generosity and goodwill, and their coworkers are likely to agree.

Flexibility

Legitimate flexibility in this context requires a Chinese menu approach ("One from column A, two from column B..."), not a cookie cutter one. The hours/compensation tradeoff should be revisited frequently and not expected to conform to a one-size-fits-all formula. And, particularly in the case of those motivated by family considerations, firms should recognize the considerable return on investment to be gained by keeping benefits in place even for those on significantly reduced schedules or leaves.

Creativity

Here's the real challenge, and the real opportunity for vision and leadership. Commitment to retention and continued fostering of talent and value requires taking the long view, and realizing that leave-precipitating events also can be fundamentally life-changing ones that warrant a thorough reassessment of the employee's contributions in the near and long terms. There's a crucial role to be played by technology here: firms that invest in tools that leverage time-shifting, and enable whenever/wherever participation that is both frictionless and rich, will have considerably more success at keeping part time employees engaged, involved, and appropriately productive than those that don't. Despite the fact such tools have blossomed and thrived in recent years as never before, and despite the benefits to be realized, law firms continue to be notoriously slow adopters. The commercial legal world seems incapable of understanding that ubiquitous Blackberrydom does not amount to a free pass entitling bearers to ignore the Live Web and Web 2.0 with impunity. But more about that in a moment. To wrap up the creativity point, in addition to lowering barriers to participation and effectiveness through such things as forward-looking technology and the efforts of a CWLBO, firms should examine what valuable contributions an employee realistically can make now (perhaps radically departing from the kinds of contributions he or she has made in the past), and what he or she reasonably can be expected to bring to the table in the future, and go from there. Firms need to acknowledge the insignificance of infant care/maternity/paternity leave in the grand scheme of raising a child, and find ways to exploit the strengths of parents as their family obligations ebb and flow over the years. (If they don't, "work-life balance" becomes as much a lie and a farce as post-termination resignation.)

I have the feeling I'll get asked a lot whether my getting fired had anything to do with my blogging and related activities. The easy answer — not as far as I know — shouldn't surprise anyone who has followed along here over the years, since I've never been a terribly kamikaze or prolific blogger, and my post-Tyler blogging, etc. has been a relative trickle. (My son is an equal opportunity time hog, albeit a cute one.) But there's more to talk about here than just the easy answer. Kevin O'Keefe's client base and several thousand others notwithstanding, Evan Schaeffer is probably correct when he says that "outsiders" (including most of the legal profession) "remain skeptical." On the subject of the Yearly Kos, an anonymous aide to a Democratic presidential candidate is quoted in a recent Newsweek as saying,

It's a little bit like 'Invasion of the Body Snatchers' with these guys. You like what they're saying when they're coming in, but you don't know what they're going to do once you let them into your house.

That seems like a decent approximation of the current attitude of law firms in general toward blogging and its ilk. Again with relatively few discerning exceptions, Live Web tools — to the extent they've even yet managed to hit the radar — can regress seasoned practitioners to the status of a two-year old taking in the Fourth of July fireworks show: they recognize something big, powerful, loud, and (when they dare look) beautiful is going on here, and they're fascinated, but they can't help being various degrees of terrified.

That will continue to change over time as law firms wake up to the fact they are classic long tail businesses and begin to act accordingly, and as it becomes apparent to all businesses that you're either in the conversation or out of it, and if you're out of it you're out of luck. The legal information cacophony cries out for trusted guides, and it is the individuals in the profession, one by one, unique ability and experience by unique ability and experience, who will fill that void (and simultaneously fill their or their employer's bank accounts). Law firms by and large actually get this. What they don't seem to get just yet is that the medium matters. That certain tools are capable of unleashing the power of the guides while others are not. That paper mail and email are dead, and the corollary, that Web site registration is offensive. That to be useful and absorbed, information, in addition to being compelling, has to be as readily accessible and locatable as possible. That knowledge management — or more precisely effective knowledge sharing, archiving, and searching — matters.

That last link is to Robert Scoble, someone for whom I have great admiration and respect. Though he went about it far more fearlessly and pointedly (and though as I understand it his blogging and related activities were actually and officially part of what Microsoft was paying him for), I hope that my blogging about the law while employed by Crosby Heafey and then Reed Smith helped me emulate Robert in some small way, and attached a human face to those organizations. I know it at least enabled me to connect several folks in need of excellent and conscientious legal assistance with the appropriate lawyers, and I feel great about that.

For the last 7½ years I've had a round-trip commute to work of anywhere from 2 hours to 4 hours a day. (Little wonder I'm such a proponent of podcasts.) Though the drive was much less of a grind during my post-Tyler, part time schedule, it almost always began with me kissing my son goodbye, telling him I loved him, and departing amid an ensuing torrent of tears that nearly justified triggering the wipers. (From time to time I'll sneak out when he's not looking, but that always feels like pulling a fast one, and he never lets it slide anyway; he freaks out once he realizes I've slipped away.) Recently, this well-meaning pattern has resulted in a dreadful side effect. Now, whenever I tell my son I love him he starts to panic: "Where Mommy go?!?" I've made it a point to tell him I love him a ridiculous number of times a day, but he can't yet seem to break the association between "I love you" and my leaving for what to him is a long, long time.

I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to putting a stop to that.

I'll be taking a blog break next week, but will be back at it at AO '06. If the gadget gods smile on me as well, I might even manage a podcast or two from there, I have some new gear to break in. Expect Sound Policy production to step up (there's already a Colette Vogele 'cast in the can that should be up very shortly I hope).

There's a Miuccia Prada quote in the current Vogue (yes, I just got my hair cut), alongside a cherry red, patent leather, Mary Jane platform shoe with a wooden gold rococo wedge:

I want to liberate the savage and passionate side of women, to do clothes that are both beautiful and mentally provocative.

I think I'll gender- and fashion-neutralize that sentiment and make it my new mantra, if that's ok with you. And with Steve. Or even if not.

One final note about the Aeron chair. It's an artifact of the pre-bust dotcom heyday, purchased at top dollar before you could pick 'em up for a song in liquidation. It's heavy, unwieldy, and not all that comfortable, and I almost donated it to Reed Smith (along with an eclectic assortment of electronics and briefcases) when the logistics of balancing it atop the boxes cramming my car made themselves clear. But then the chair spoke to me as an envoy from the past — from the days when I first read Cluetrain, Gonzo Marketing (Amazon tells me I purchased that item on October 27, 2001), and Small Pieces, when those books, and then their authors, and everyone to whom they directly or indirectly introduced me, quite literally changed my life and put me on the course I've been on and on which I hope to remain. I rearranged boxes, rolled up my sleeves with Roscoe from the mail room (who also exhorted me to bring a bottle of wine to the beach on a weekday some time soon, which I promised him I'd do), and trundled the chair on home.

...may be heard here.

Podcasts of the sessions from the recent Corporate Podcasting Summit will be available for free in coming months from IT Conversations, here's the feed. Or, you can purchase the QuickCast for $24.99 and have them all now if you'd like.

Jeneane Sessum on 'the re-socializing of business through the Internet': "The legacy of MySpace and LiveJournal on the soon-to-enter-the-workplace generation will be telling."

Yep.

Blaugh's comic of the day

Praise Berners-Lee, I'm back on the tubes.

It's 110+ where I am, and I've been listening to Al Gore, The Earth in the Balance.

Also terrific on the way out: Cory's I, Rowboat.

Marty's post has had me musing about virtual lawyers in Second Life.

Here's what you get when you call up AT&T to (finally) request that they bring your DSL service up to the "pro" level for which you've been paying over the last year but never have gotten: line testing and resetting that destroys what little connectivity you were subsisting on, and a technician out to look at things — in 5 days. Hence, I'm mostly offline at the moment. Enjoying a temporary stint of connectivity in the walloping 110-degree furnace that is Indian Wells, CA, but running around too much to take advantage.

I haven't researched it but am betting there's a good deal of class action activity around this service level issue...

Adam's Mom by ZDNet's Steve Gillmor — "Adam Curry's mom passed away over the weekend. All of our thoughts and love are with you and your family, Adam."

So sorry to hear this Adam, be well.

Bloggger and trademark lawyer Marty Schwimmer has a fascinating post about the use of real world trademarks in virtual world Second Life.

Real Trademark Issues In Virtual Worlds | digg story

Internet pioneer and Google VP Vint Cerf says Google's next stop on the quest to ensure net neutrality is the DOJ's antitrust division, if and when "something bad happens."

Google says bill could spark antitrust fight | digg story

This California Lawyer Magazine article looks at how copyright disputes can result under the work-for-hire doctrine because Web designers typically are independent consultants and not "employees."

Do You Own Your Website? | digg story

[Update:] C.E. Petit doesn't disagree with the article's analysis, but thinks the underlying authorities raise constitutional issues.

This California Lawyer Magazine article explains how "improving your search engine ranking, or 'search engine optimization,' can be fraught with legal pitfalls."

Search Engines in Overdrive | digg story

UK online marketing firm econsultancy has blogged its "12 reasons why UK businesses don't blog," and provided well-considered responses to each of the concerns. I like No. 10: "Q: You think blogging is all hype / a passing fad / for kids. A: Sure it is, whatever you say..."

The 12 reasons why UK businesses don't blog | digg story

Happy Independence Day

Frank Paynter, re-encuentro.

Mad Kane, Bush Isn't God. Who Knew?

EFF, join.

Liz Daube has a story on the rise and rise of the blawgosphere in the Jacksonville Financial News & Daily Record: "Are they doing it to inform the public, or garner more clients?" asks Elizabeth Talbert, ethics counsel at the Florida Bar. Uh, yes, which highlights why lawyer advertising rules deserve considered reexamination in the era of the Live Web.

You're getting a lot of attention these days:

• YouTube
• KYOU
• Not news to you, but You top the list of Who Matters Now
• You're also on top when it comes to power, taste (see Chris Anderson's The Rise and Fall of the Hit, available 7/6), production, and economic clout.

It's about time, but try not to let it go to your head!

Blawg Review #64 is up, brought to you by Howard Bashman.

Alice LaPlante takes a look at "multiple bills are now in progress in Congress that would further erode the rights of consumers to copy, move, or share media for their own personal use."

Media Distribution Rights: Here Come The Judges (And Congress) | digg story

Some photos from the Corporate Podcasting Summit