Mexican-Jumping-Football-Baby

When I mentioned to Hanan Levin that BH apparently has been trampolining off my spleen and pancreas, he of course had just the link:

"Trapped Bear Springs Off Trampoline To Safety"

As of this week the baby has a doctor, so I'm feeling slightly less troubled that having a room still is a ways off. Dr. A. turned out to be a pleasant young South African-Israeli, whose waiting room was packed with a great variety of moms and dads to be, including a couple expecting through a surrogate. I found the whole process of baby doctor selection and designation eye opening. This is how it works (here, and I'm assuming elsewhere): as long as your baby will be born at a hospital in your baby doctor's "jurisdiction," it turns out all you need to know at zero-hour is the doc's name. He or she doesn't need advance notice, or a call from you when labor starts, because the pediatricians patrol the maternity ward regularly looking for the new babies to whom they've been assigned. It's a never ending draft of rookie recruits, with choose-ups happening each morning in the nursery.

Today's New Blawg

Christophe Courchesne is a member of the 3L class and Board of Student Advisors at Harvard Law School. Christophe is attending BloggerCon at the suggestion of his professors John Palfrey and Charles Nesson, and mentions that the Digital Democracy class at Harvard Law will discuss blogging during next week's session, Smart Mobs, Weblogs, Hacktivism: Social and Political Implications of Decentralized Networks, featuring guest Joi Ito.

Christophe has several good comments and observations from BloggerCon, including:

• A comment raised in the education context is that making blogs a fundamental part of education will potentially contribute to dilution of writing's power by eliminating intermediary filters?


• The education forum had a tremendous optimism about the use of blogs in education. As a law review editor and a legal writing teacher, I have tremendous doubt about the editorial quality of work that is published "unedited" (including my own). This presents some tension between the Internet prophecies about the wired democratized future and the values of discipline as to writing skills and "thinking carefully before one speaks."


• Do students who blog develop more finely tuned skills of listening or just a highly developed ability to mouth off within a sophisticated zone of self-publishing?

I don't think these questions can be answered in terms of absolutes. I see weblogs as more of an aid than a threat to edited/quality writing; they make it easier than ever to disseminate. They also can motivate editorial compression in the interest of time (or impulsiveness), and this may may mean an increase in the sum total of unedited or lightly edited writing. My take is the two varieties can peacefully co-exist, both have unique usefulness and value, and good, well considered, well edited writing will continue to distinguish itself from the pack.

BloggerCon Webcasts

BloggerCon is webcasting from two rooms today, including the one where Jeff Jarvis just welcomed attendees to a session on Weblogs and Presidential Politics, joined by panelists Dan Gillmor and Ed Cone. The next session to be webcast from this room will be the Weblogs and Law discussion, led by Eugene Volokh (1:30 - 3:00 Eastern).

Significantly Statistical

Dave Sifry: "Technorati is currently tracking about 7,000 new weblogs per day, which means that a new weblog is being created approximately every 12 seconds. And I know we're not catching them all." [Via Doc Searls]

Lisa Williams: "How many posts did the 215 attendees on the blogroll make in the ten days prior to the conference in the aggregate? A whopping 2,757." [Via Localfeeds, the uber-aggregator for BloggerCon]

Who Will M Your DRM?

David Opderbeck:

The MPEG Licensing Association, a consortium of companies that licenses patent right relating to MPEG 4 audio and video technology, is seeking to serve as an industry standards-setting forum for DRM systems. In one way, this seems like a good development — let a private DRM market develop and regulate itself. In another way, however, it has some frightening potential — let a consortium of media companies effectively determine the scope of copyright and fair use through DRM standards that cannot be circumvented under the DMCA.

Completely unrelatedly, David also reports that James Earl Jones confirmed in a talk at Seton Hall this week that "he has several minutes of dialogue in Star Wars 3 after Anakin Skywalker falls into a volcano and is outfitted with the Darth Vader garb."