TWiL Up

Our second episode of this WEEK in LAW, with guest Mike Arrington and co-panelists Cathy Kirkman and Ernie Svenson, is available. Show notes here; feed here.

Rock You

Speaking of Queen, do yourself a favor and listen right now to the concluding track of Jonathan Coulton's Thing A Week IV, his cover of We Will Rock You/We Are The Champions. Then do yourself another and pick up some holiday gifts folks are sure to love: Coulton's Thing A Week I and Thing A Week II on CD (only $8/cd when you buy more than 1).

Speaking of great but lesser known musical artistry, thanks so much to MommyCast for turning me on to Marina Belica and October Project.

Plumb General Counsel Jobs

I'm here at Web 2.0, where two really amazing General Counsel openings have come to my attention.

The first is with Tucows. If I had any desire to move to Toronto, Ontario, you wouldn't be hearing about this from me because I'd have snapped it up by now. Elliot Noss is one of the coolest people on the planet. His main qualification for filling this spot: that you love the Internet. Interestingly, they've been trying to lure candidates by placing an enticing ad on Rob Hyndman's blog ("Are you a brilliant lawyer? Hate life at your firm? Love the Internet? Click here for a better life!"), which somehow has not resulted in a flood of resumes. Maybe blogging it is a more effective way to get the word out. Whatever the case, get in there and take advantage, this is a terrific opportunity.

The second is with a Mountain View, California organization that is One You Know, and, again, I can scarcely imagine a more interesting in-house spot. I can't say more here because they haven't announced it publicly, but if you're interested, and know a thing or two about open source software, ping me and I'll fill you in.

[Prurient postscript:] In case you weren't aware, Blawg Review's anonymous editor is quite a wordsmith. He was kind enough to point out a rather critical distinction between plumb (that link is not exactly work safe) vs. plum jobs...Since the post headline has long since propagated out to aggregators, I guess I'll just have to make sure things around here are sufficiently buckled and buttoned to discourage any misguided search traffic....

The Car Off Your Back

As if there weren't already enough reasons why Marc and Lisa Canter rock out loud: last night after the opening festivities of Web 2.0, when I accidentally locked my rental car into a San Francisco parking garage, they loaned me their car without blinking an eye. End result, I got to have breakfast with my son this morning, and nothing is worth more than that. Thanks so much Canters, the Magical Mystery Bus is on its way back home.

OwnzOred, By Google (Happy, By God)

Steve Gillmor ended a recent Gillmor Gang on a provacative note: Google Alerts now includes Blogs (along with News, Web, and Groups; if you select "comprehensive" as the alert type you get 'em all). Interesting. I noticed the other day Google had added a "Search blogs" button at the end of its News search results that automatically translates your pending search into a blog search, and further noticed how much more useful the blog search results were for the particular thing I was looking for (characterization of RSS as "really simple stealing").

The ways in which Google makes itself indispensable keep proliferating. Still eschewing Blackberry and/or Treodom, I've been living on Gmail in my cell phone for some time; and that already terrific experience just got much better. Not yet, but soon I'm sure, this will eliminate the need to worry about getting one's contacts on to one's cell phone; they'll just be there, thanks to Gmail. Gmail makes any phone a "smart" phone, full of your crucial data to access in a couple of clicks.

In fact, Google is becoming The Network in so many ways, among other things it's eliminating the need to trouble yourself with local networking considerations. Example: I have WiFi'd Macs at home, a pretty seamless networked environment. "Pretty" seamless, but not perfectly so. When seconds count, the Google Network wins. Example: a week ago at this time, I was getting out Blawg Review #81. I had about a dozen tabs open in Firefox with things I still needed to pull in, and the draft post saved in a text editor. Baby monitor goes off, I run downstairs, settle Tyler back to sleep in my bed, which is not terribly safe for him when I'm not there (high off the ground, no rails). So, I've got to finish up my work there instead of upstairs. The MacBook Pro is more than up to the task, but it's upstairs, and I've been working on a different machine (also upstairs). This wasn't a situation where I could spend time mucking about even with Bonjour — which wouldn't have been any help as far as the work I was doing in the browser, anyway. I needed to run upstairs, grab my laptop, and be able to pick up where I left off. No problem: the post-in-progress went off in 2-3 clicks as a Gmail attachment I could collect downstairs, and, more critically, when I fired up the laptop Google Browser Sync politely offered to open the huge batch of browser tabs I'd been working with on the other computer. Done. So Google supplies my home network infrastructure, in addition to everything else.

I'm not sure where exactly all this is going, it should work seamlessly with Blogger though, gotta give that a whirl. More to the big picture, it's undeniably world-altering to have a free, easy to use document creation and editing tool that offers "collaborate" and "publish" as core functions — and that integrates with the rest of the Googlesphere.

Marc, I hear you, but resistance is futile...