Yessir, That's My Baby

Taken May 30: 12 weeks, 6 days

Queen, Country, And Mutton Dressed As Lamb

Rick Klau, you rock, for (among other things) linking to Virginia Heffernan and her Slate review of the BBC's "What Not To Wear:"

Emphasize your waist. Reveal your décolletage. Dress in burgundy. Wear heels. For women, these four imperatives appear to have near universal application, and week after week Trinny and Susannah hand them down with such brio that I'm always happy to hear them again.

Like Heffernan, I don't quite get why I'm so enamored of these two but there's no denying it. Finding a new episode on the TiVo is like debarking from a rough channel crossing (even though it would take technology on the order of Landsat to locate my décolletage).

Blogging Is A Conversation

So, I've been noticing a little chatter about this press/blogger distinction as I continue to post my notes from D. No one has asked me not to do this (a fact that is utterly unsurprising to me given the overall insignificance of this weblog and its authoress). Moreover, nothing on the conference Web site, in the related materials I received or in the comments from the stage led me to believe the remarks of the speakers were not an appropriate subject for public discussion. If someone nonetheless thinks I am undermining the fabric of an ordered society and should cut it out post haste, I'd like to hear about it, and why. I'd also like to give a tip o' the bowler to Ben Hammersley, who points out the enduring importance of trust, confidence, good manners and circumspection, even (or perhaps especially) in the world, as he puts it, of webloggery.

I will note I can think of two times in the past when in good conscience I did not feel I could blog a speaker's remarks without his or her express consent. Once was when Glenn Otis Brown of Creative Commons spoke at my law firm, and the other was when Chief Judge Schroeder of the Ninth Circuit spoke at a local bar function. In both cases, I felt given the circumstances of the talks the speakers would have been caught off guard later to discover that an attendee had publicized their remarks on a Web site. However, in considering the expectations of the very public, and presumably quite Web savvy, figures speaking at a conference called D: All Things Digital, I must say I reached some different conclusions—especially in the absence of confidentiality requests to the audience.*

If you have something you think I need to hear along these lines, I'd like to hear it soon; my notes of the copyright panel in particular are fairly burning a hole on my desktop...

*And then of course there are events like Digital ID World, where the very stability of the space-time continuum can be threatened by the on- and off-site blogging.

The Carrot vs. Stick Approach

Lots of news today about Altnet, the Kazaa partner that seeks to reduce P2P sharing of unauthorized copyrighted material by paying users to share authorized files. From the Los Angeles Times ("Offering Prizes for Legal File Sharing"): "Analyst P.J. McNealy of GartnerG2, a technology research and consulting firm, said the points program may be based on a flawed assumption: that the files Altnet wants to provide are compelling." See also [via ILN] c | net News.com ("Altnet to pay Kazaa users for swapping") and SiliconValley.com/AP ("'Rewards' to encourage legal file sharing").

While it's a laudable concept, without the backing of the major labels I don't think this has a prayer. (But then, I could never figure out why people thought iWon search was a good idea either.)

Takin' It Easy

Howard's interview with 9th Circuit Judge Michael Daly Hawkins is up. (Unsurprisingly, His Honor is curious as to when Howard sleeps.)