Saturday evening posts

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I have become obsessed with two new things: iMapMyRun and Google Maps. See how I added photos to the map above (click on the little blue flag icon things)? How cool is that? I know Google isn’t probably as benevolent as they’d like us to believe, but I can’t help but love them sometimes.

@jkbeitz Google wants all my information. Apple wants all my money.—
Paul Merwin (@pmerwin) December 29, 2010

Meaty weekend reading

It’s the weekend, so (1) the flurry of posts is a bit lighter, and (2) hopefully you have a little more time than usual for a good read. With that in mind, you may want to peruse these somewhat more substantial posts:

• Ellen A. Laird, The Chronicle Review, Prime Suspect, Second Row Center . Chilling, sobering story of a community college professor and the term she had an accused murderer in her class – an English class whose main focus was crime literature.
  

  I did not use his last name in class, but several students—tightlipped and stone-faced—knew exactly who he was. They struck me as uncharacteristically, almost eerily reserved, right from the start. At each class meeting the first week, some of the seats around him were empty.

Morning postpocalypse

Think of me, teaching my class while you’re perusing these posts!

• In the “Useful copyright information” division: Grace Bonney, Design*Sponge, How to credit an image in your blog. Via @sglassmeyer, who is awesome. I will probably stick to posting images I have created myself, like the lovely photo to the left.

Erin Go Bragh, y’all

Some reading material while you’re enjoying your morning Irish Coffee.

• From the “This is why I’m glad I don’t eat animals” division: Mark Bittman, NYT, Why Don’t Farm Animals Get the Respect Pets Do? – NYTimes.com. Don’t read this while you’re eating.
• From the “Photography/Lawsuits (or Photography lawsuits)” division: Guy Adams, The Independent, “Ansel Adams, the ‘lost negatives’ and a $200m lawsuit.”

Posts o’the mornin’

When we have our RSS assignment in Internet Legal Research, we require our students to sign up for 5 blogs (last year we required them to sign up for 10, and students found that too onerous).  I currently follow 181 blogs on my Reader, and 222 people on Twitter, ranging from “serious” (and not-so-serious) legal topics, to pop culture, to people who make purses that I like.

Every morning when I get up I have at least 50 blog posts to go through in my reader, and countless other links to interesting things from people I follow on Twitter. Note – I never read them all; I look at the little summaries that I get in my Google Reader gadget on my iGoogle page, and click on some of them and mark the others as read (of course, the posts grow all day long; I continually “weed” my Reader because I hate for it to get too unwieldy. I do try to read all summaries to see if I’m interested enough in a post to continue on).

Some of the posts that caught my eye this morning were:

• In the “Pop Culture” division:
  • Tom & Lorenzo, “OUT Magazine’s Vintage Madonna.” Old photos of Madonna from before she was popular. I love these shots! I can’t believe something could make me nostalgic for the 80s, but these photos do.
• In the “legal” division:
  • JDs Rising (Minn. Lawyer), “Could Your Client’s Identity Be Stolen Based on Your Conduct? The Importance of Minn. R. Gen. Prac. 11.” Just wanted to alert you to some good, practical advice. Scrub your clients’ private data, people!
• In the “WTF? (Racist)” division:
  • MorningGloria’s tumblr feed, quoting New York congressional candidate Jack Davis, via Mother Jones. Really, Mr. Davis? Really?
• In the “Privacy” divison:
  • Kashmir Hill, Forbes, “Etsy’s Experiment With Social Could Be Costly.” I don’t think people really want to see what their friends are purchasing on Etsy, do you?
• In the “Politics” division:
  • Chris Georgacas, MPR News, “Walker’s bill was halfhearted measure in face of a looming economic disaster.”

  But even for tough-sounding, allegedly fiscally hawkish politicians, winning future votes and maintaining popularity are always more important than confronting a crisis. Especially when officialdom can downplay the crisis’s dimensions.

Let me know if you find any of these interesting!