Trust Lawyers

Trust lawyers to understand the importance of trust.

These hilarious comments follow the announcement by Geeklawyer that he's taking off skiing for 10 days in Austria and, while he's tracking Teutonic totty, expects fidelity of his babes in the British blogosphere.

Speaking of lawyers and trust, Duncan Bucknell at IP ThinkTank is hosting the Carnival of Trust next Monday, and he'd like to include some posts about "trust" from law blogs. Here's the skinny on how to get featured in the Carnival of Trust.

Rubbernecking

It's a disaster and we can't help rubbernecking!

One of the founders of the Carnival of the Capitalists, a.k.a. CotC, is doing everything possible to wreck it.

Er… Um… Right, Need to Do CotC

I’m so thrilled, too. Nobody really seems to be interested in it anymore. I’ve been preoccupied. There were all of 14 submissions, most of which didn’t make me say “great post!” but some of which will do. I probably have a few more I’ve bookmarked. Shouldn’t take long, once I’ve done errands ahead of the snow and muck.

Seriously, though. Traffic is still sinking. Entries plummeted this week. Nobody apparently wants to host, apart from me and, after the dust clears from the baby’s arrival, Rob. I’d blame it all on the change to a static location, but hosts were getting scarce before, traffic was absurd, and entries had fallen and disproportionately not so great.

I might be willing to have people host on their own blogs, combined with the new screening of entries, if there’s vehemence about the new “not a carnival but a weekly feature of this blog” arrangement, and if more good hosts would come forward. However, I think people aren’t volunteering to host because they aren’t reading CotC and aren’t seeing the requests, and aren’t interested in seeing the requests. If it were hosted elsewhere some weeks, it would probably only be some weeks, and it’d be here, done by me, the rest of the time.

Oh well. The next few weeks are likely to be especially tough, and after a while it’ll settle out one way or another, if I don’t suspend it before then.

Unable to figure out the cause of the demise of the oldest blog carnival, the founders of the CotC have blamed everyone and everything imaginable -- except themselves. Nobody wants to host a blog carnival, they say. Blog carnivals are dead, anyway. We had a great idea, but everyone fucked it up for us.

Having hosted the Carnival of the Capitalists three times here on the Blawg Review weblog, and elsewhere myself, it's probably fair for me to say, "You don't deserve to be in charge of the Carnival of the Capitalists anymore. In business, you'd have been fired for mismanagement. At least one of you knows when to quit." Dammit, somebody had to say it.

Blawg Review has a few hosting dates available in 2008. If anyone, like Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends, or David Maister at Passion, People and Principles, is interested in hosting a business blog carnival for lawyers on any of the 8 dates still available to host Blawg Review in 2008, listed in the sidebar on our blog carnival home page here, please volunteer. We're still havin' fun.

Catch of the Day

Brett Trout presents Blawg Review #148.

What's the Rush?

Rush on over to Blawg Review #147.

Unhappy Valentine's Day

Not really in a valentine mood...but wait, what's this?

Update: David Harlow, who hosted Blawg Review #88 and #129, is hosting this week's medical blog carnival, Grand Rounds Vol. 4 No. 21: The Valentine's Day Edition, at HealthBlawg.

Nipper's Blawg Review

Nipper (1884 - 1895) was a dog that served as the model for a painting entitled His Master's Voice, which later became identified with a series of audio recording brands, including RCA Records. It's quite a story.

Nipper’s original owner, Mark Henry Barraud, died in 1887, leaving his brothers Philip and Francis to care for the dog. In 1898, three years after Nipper’s death, Francis painted a picture of Nipper listening intently to a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph. On February 11, 1899, Francis filed an application for copyright of his picture “Dog Looking At and Listening to a Phonograph.” Thinking the Edison-Bell Company might find it useful, he presented it to James E. Hough who (displaying the kind of thinking that would eventually doom the Edison Records company itself) promptly said, “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs.”

On May 31, 1899, Francis went to the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company with the intention of borrowing a brass horn to replace the original black horn on the painting. Manager, William Barry Owen suggested that if the artist replaced the entire machine with a Berliner disc gramophone, the Company would buy the painting. The slogan “His Master’s Voice” along with the painting were sold to The Gramophone Company for 100 pounds sterling. As Francis Barraud stated about this famous painting: “It is difficult to say how the idea came to me beyond that fact that it suddenly occurred to me that to have my dog listening to the Phonograph, with an intelligent and rather puzzled expression, and call it “His Master’s Voice” would make an excellent subject. We had a phonograph and I often noticed how puzzled he was to make out where the voice came from. It certainly was the happiest thought I ever had.” Presumption that Nipper is sitting on the coffin of his former master has never been confirmed by the artist nor the Victor Talking Machine Company. Nipper had three masters during his lifetime, Mark, Philip, and Francis Barraud. Not one master ever made a sound recording for Nipper to hear.

This modified form of the painting became the successful trademark of Victor and HMV records, HMV music stores, and RCA. (See HMV for a complete history of the brands based on Nipper.)

Coincidentally, or not, this week's Blawg Review #146 is hosted by patent attorney Stephen Nipper at The Invent Blog on National Inventor's Day in honor of Thomas Alva Edison, the inventor of the phonograph!

Out And About

It's been an interesting week for the Editor of Blawg Review, who, like many bloggers, doesn't get away from the computer and out into the real world as often as he should.

Invited by ALM's Jill Windwer, David Snow, and John Bringardner, to attend the blogger meetup at LegalTech this week, I didn't hesitate to fly to New York City to get together with several law bloggers who know me only through Blawg Review.


Among the law bloggers I got to spend some quality time with at the conference were the hosts of Blawg Review #18 Monica Bay, #21 Carolyn Elefant, #108 Arnie Herz, and #134 Eric Turkewitz, who blogged about seeing me in person and posted a photo to prove it.

At LegalTech I was also sighted by Bob Ambrogi, who's been holding out since 2006 for the opportunity to host the first "podcast" presentation of Blawg Review with his Lawyer2Lawyer co-host Craig Williams, whom I've met in person on a couple of occasions at his office in Newport Beach where he had hosted #28.

While visiting in California last year, I took advantage of opportunities to meet up with others who have hosted Blawg Review. Denise Howell, who gave us back-to-back Howell-o-ween presentations #30 and #81, introduced me to her son Tyler and walked us around Balboa Island. On two separate occasions, in different cities, I met with Dan Hull, who's hosting this week's Blawg Review #146. Colin Samuels, who hosted three award-winning presentations of Blawg Review #35, #86, and #137 has met me a couple of times at the Bay Area Law Bloggers Meetups, where I also caught up with LexBlog's Kevin O'Keefe, who had hosted #125 from Seattle just the day before we got together over beers in San Francisco.

Heading out of New York City this week, I took the Amtrak train to Schenectady, of all places, where I stayed overnight to spend the better part of the next day with the host of Blawg Review #52, the haiku blogger dagosan f/k/a David Giacalone, who wrote today in his inimitable style about the time we spent together in the Stockade.


David will probably never know how much I was touched by this thoughtful postcard that memorializes the special time we spent offline.

Super Bowl Blawg Review

Wondering what to do after the Super Bowl? If you're in New York, keep partying. If you're in Boston, keep drinking. Everyone else, read Blawg Review #145: The Super Bowl Edition, and click on the graphic above to watch Super Bowl Commercials on YouTube and vote for your favorites.

What's Happening?

Speaking of freezing at Grand Central Station, it's gonna be cold when we arrive for next week's LegalTech New York event. Still, I'm looking forward to covering the story on Blawg Review -- "live from New York" as they say.

Here's the scoop from Monica Bay, the Editor-in-Chief of Law Technology News:

Bloggers who are journalists, consultants, or analysts should let us know if they need free press credentials. (Vendor bloggers are welcome to participate, but we can’t offer them press credentials.) Please email requests for credentials to LegalBlogWatch@alm.com by noon on Monday, Feb. 4, and pick up your credentials at LegalTech registration during the show. When you email your request, be sure to include your name, address, blog name, email address and phone number.

All bloggers are welcome to join us Wednesday, from 9-10 a.m., for an informal bloggers gathering at the Pettite Trianon Room, on the 3rd floor of the Hilton. We'll even provide lousy coffee and mediocre Danish.

If you're hoping to spot an elusive editor at LegalTech in New York next week, Ed will be there sporting Blawg Review "press credentials" courtesy of the good folks at ALM.

And, if you'd like to meetup with me personally while we're visiting in the Big Apple, please send an email to editor@blawgreview.com with your contact information and we'll try to get together. I have no idea where I'm staying.