Necessary Objects

Larry Magid covers portable podcast recorders today. I have the M-Audio 24/96 and love it. It recorded my interview with Greg Pierson if you want to get an idea how it sounds. We were outdoors, passing this mic.

If you intend to go cold turkey on TV, DVDs, etc. for a week, and there's a two-year-old involved, and you hope to keep blogging and/or sane, one of these contraptions is indispensable (not to mention conducive of a perpetually Lawrence Welkian atmosphere).

The Good

Ian Best, Where is the Hudson v. Michigan Blog? - A Suggestion for Law Students:

[A]ny important case could merit a blog. The same holds for any significant statute or regulation, or for any major trial. Many legal specialties do not yet have a blog devoted to them (adoption law, for example). By creating a blog, a law student can take online ownership of whatever topic he chooses. He can turn his blog into a continuously updated resource that actual lawyers and judges pay attention to. He can invite lawyers and law professors to post their scholarship on his site, whether short-form or long-form, with a variety of styles ranging from the colloquial to the formal. He can also conduct his own research and publish his own work. Such a student may end up becoming a nationally-recognized authority on his chosen topic.

Rosa Brooks, What the Internet Age Means for Female Scholars: "The changes ushered in by the Internet offer both promise and peril for women scholars. Let's start with the positive. . . ." (Professor Brooks also thinks, like Dahlia Lithwick before her, that "women legal bloggers are still thin on the ground." I would tend to disagree.)

If I were inclined to also point to The Bad and/or The Ugly I might reference Brian Leiter, Why Blogs Are Bad For Legal Scholarship, but I'm in too good a mood.

Today's New Blawg

The Public Blawg, from Meyers Nave, focused on California public agency law.

Hot, Exhibitionist Worms

That headline should result in some intriguing Google traffic. It's by way of linking to:

Stephanie West Allen, Hot Worms and Workaholics: Let the Workers Be!. Stephanie makes some excellent points, but I think the overarching takeaway is the modern workplace's need to comfortably accommodate a variety of environments, recognizing that one worm's smorgasbord is another's sayonara.

The Washington Post, A Web of Exhibitionists: a study in missing the mark about sixteen different ways (and, as Ann Althouse points out, doing so less than succinctly). The article steamrolls right over the crucial distinction between craving attention and participating in an attention economy. While an attention circus may be a sexier topic, the bigger, longer-term, less flashy, more significant story is what the world's billions are doing with their Web tools when they're not lip-syncing and huckstering.

It Never Rains

Just as a public service for anyone who may be joining us in Southern California next week for the Podcast Academy and/or Podcast and Portable Media Expo, better pack your bikinis and trunks: it's still hot in Ontario.