Category Archives: Blogs

Why It’s Called “Pandagon”

Posted on February 20, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

How blogs get their names tends to be either obvious or interesting. My blog got its name from a paper I wrote about the Internet and Habermas's theory of discourse. Here's how Pandagon got its name.

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Textile 2 Released

Posted on February 7, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Brad Choate has released Textile 2. The first edition of Textile was a super plug-in for MT, and this one looks even better. In fact it looks like substantially more than I need. Textile 2 does, however, fix the thing about the first edition that most bugged me: now it's easy to use textile commands for multi-paragraph blockquotes.

If you blog with MT, you really should get this plugin. It's very easy to install, and it does provide all sorts of markup shortcuts for formatting your text.

Thank you Mr. Choate!

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Brad DeLong Attempts Open Source Journalism

Posted on February 5, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Brad DeLong is asking people what questions Tim Russert should ask GW Bush. And he's primed the pump with a few zingers of his own. My reactions in order:

  1. This is exactly how to harness that famous “power of the Internet”
  2. In Britain, they actually do ask Ministers questions like this on Radio 4 and on Newsnight
  3. Anyone who asked a President questions like that in this country would be pilloried as “disrespectful”.
  4. So it won't work. Even if a journalist had the guts, the shill media would turn on him.
  5. This is so very, very sad….
  6. Oh, hell, can't hurt to try. If nothing else we can compare the actual to the hypothetical and maybe some day…
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New Blog on Catholic Legal Theory

Posted on February 3, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Say hello to the Mirror of Justice, a new blog “dedicated to the development of Catholic legal theory.”

The impressive (but maybe slightly right-leaning?) list of founder members say they don't always agree on matters of politics and even Church, but are united in that,

We all believe that faith-based discourse is entirely legitimate in the academy and in the public square, and that religious values need not be bracketed in academic or public conversation.

…

This blog will not focus primarily on the classic constitutional questions of Church and State, although some of our members are interested in those questions and may post on them from time to time. We are more interested in tackiling the larger jurisprudential questions and in discussing how Catholic thought and belief should influence the way we think about corporate law, products liability or capital punishment or any other problem in or area of the law.

Sounds like a conversation I'll enjoy eavesdropping on.

Just one request, though: please could you add an RSS feed?

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Two Great Online Resources

Posted on January 12, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Two great links snagged from cogdogblog

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Does Blogging Count as Academic Work?

Posted on January 8, 2004 by Michael Froomkin

Stephen Bainbridge's somewhat tongue in check suggestion that if his blog is being cited in high-class law journals maybe he should get institutional credit for blogging gets taken somewhat seriously by one law dean.

Boy do I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I think a smart Law Dean (or any academic administrator) should encourage blogging by folks who will raise an institution's profile as part of a general strategy of institutional advancement. I proposed just that to our Dean some time ago, but other than generously offering to pay my hosting costs (an offer I declined so that I could also use the host in good conscience for various personal and family projects), and telling the faculty in a memo that if anyone else wants a blog the school would pick up the tab, the idea didn't go far in the law school; fortunately the University will be rolling out blogs for everyone Real Soon Now. While I could see a very enlightened Dean counting blogging as a form of community service, I wouldn't expect that to be very common. That said, there are a few blogs — Larry Solum's extraordinary efforts come immediately to mind even without prompting — that probably should count in other columns too.

On the other hand, while if pressed I would claim that my running ICANNWatch is a form of community service, I wouldn't make that claim for the more self-indulgent, mostly half-baked, musings and agitprop here. Plus, I'd feel odd asking for credit for another one of my hobbies. I already made my hobby my job by becoming an Internet lawyer. Besides, I'm already having too much fun on my job to make this part of it.

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