Random Saturday Thoughts

If this is the class, you're the curriculum. [Via Dave Winer]

If Howard Bashman had a brother and the brothers had a blog (like Eugene, Sasha and now pal Juan), they'd be, of course, The Bash Brothers.

Copyright Has Little Elves

C-a-n-'-t t-y-p-e --
l-a-u-g-h-i-n-g t-o-o h-a-r-d --
g-o h-e-r-e!

Thanks, Donna, I needed that.

Blogging The Marketplace

In keeping with the theme of blogs in business, Dave Winer had the same reaction to this piece as I did:

"[I]t's not about advertising. It's the inverse of advertising. The economic revolution of blogging is about manufacturers giving up on advertising and going direct, talking to their users, and their competitors' users. And that won't be enough either. They'll also have to listen to the users. (BTW, that doesn't mean they have to do what the users tell them to do, nor is that always a good idea, it's not so simple and linear.)"

And, here's Genie Tyburski's (of the Virtual Chase) take on "the value of decentralized news or 'information flows:'"

"[C]onsider this. Wednesday afternoon at about 1:30 pm, I uploaded the expert witness article I announced in yesterday's alert. I also linked to it in our RSS feed. By 1:45 pm, Ernie the Attorney announced its availability. By 3:30 pm, Daypop had indexed it via Ernie the Attorney. By late afternoon, more than 100 visitors had read it -- all before I announced its availability!"

[From today's Virtual Chase Alert] We're going to need shades when all those blogging lightbulbs go off over business heads at the same time 8-].

Let's Try And Keep Up, Shall We?

I suppose when the same thing comes at you on the same day from two different places, you have to blog it. Chuck Hartley writes about Formal Opinion No. 2001-155 of the Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct of the State Bar of California (fondly known as COPRAC), and how it fails to address what an attorney-maintained site that incorporates "live video interactivity, a bulletin board, links to other law-related web sites, or news group functions" - or one or more weblogs, for that matter - must or must not do in order to comply with applicable standards of professional responsibility and conduct. Jon Amberg and John Rewinsky also discuss the opinion in this month's Los Angeles Lawyer, and remark how use of the Web raises ethical issues for lawyers. This begs the question: what's a "blawger" to do?

According to the opinion, a California attorney's site that contains information for the public about her "availability for employment" is a "communication" and an "advertisement" subject to some rather onerous record-keeping and content requirements. Copies of every page of every version and revision of the site must be kept for two years. False or misleading statements are right out. Moreover, since a Web site - by definition - is viewable in other jurisdictions, the attorney Web publisher has to worry about being accused of the "unauthorized practice of law" in places far from home. The California rules and ethics opinions do not seem to address whether different standards should apply to personal attorney sites versus commercial ones, and the same appears true of the ABA model rules. (Other sources? Let me know.)

Thus do California lawyers find themselves on the horns of a Cluetrain-y, Gonzoid, Loosely Joined dilemma. Weblogs, if used on a commercial site - and used right - will make it more "personal." "Personal" sites likewise become more "professional" when one writes about - among other things - one's profession. There already is a good deal of crossover between this blog and my firm's site - some of the "Keeping Current" material there will look familiar if you've been checking in here. Should the two be treated differently from a professional responsibility standpoint? I'm inclined to say "yes," but I don't necessarily like where that goes - it assumes the firm site must be all about Making You Its Client, and this site must be all about things like Indy cars and Star Trek. The reality should be recognized as lying somewhere in between. That way, the law firm need not quiet the voices of its constituent members, and I need not ignore my lawyerdom here.

There goes the Web again, introducing gray areas and blurring distinctions. It's hard to predict what the ethicists will do when they confront whether the burdens on individual record-keeping and speech should be increased, or the ones on a law office should be lessened, when both actually may be doing similar things on the Web.

Contextual

Jeffrey Rosen's April 14 New York Times Magazine article (registration required), Silicon Valley's Spy Game:

'''Today, every federal intelligence and law-enforcement agency and all manner of state and local bodies maintain their own separate databases on suspected criminals,' Larry Ellison, the founder and C.E.O. of Oracle Corporation, wrote in The Wall Street Journal last October. 'Do we need more databases? No, just the opposite. The biggest problem today is that we have too many. The single thing we could do to make life tougher for terrorists would be to ensure that all the information in myriad government databases was integrated into a single national file.' Oracle, in fact, is the world's largest database manufacturer, and Ellison offered to donate the software for a single national database free of charge to the United States government. (The company, Ellison added, would charge for upgrades and maintenance.) ... It's not surprising, of course, that Larry Ellison sincerely believes that what's good for Oracle is good for America. But there are, in fact, differences between an e-business and the American government, differences that perhaps should make us hesitate before reconstructing America along the business model of the Oracle Corporation."