Robert S Tanner

The lawyer networking site Avvo.com must not be getting that much traffic yet as I was listed as #5 on the Avvo Blog's "Top 10 Lawyers Viewed Last Week" post. It's just kind of odd really.

I've played soccer all my life.  And although it gets a little harder to recover from each game as life rolls on I still really enjoy playing the sport.  My current recreational team, the (in my not-so-humble opinion, cleverly named) Wholigans, opened its Fall season with a smashing 5-0 victory.

I haven't done anything personally with the new AVVO Lawyer listing website but I did get an email from them notifying me that I could merge my various profiles there (they set up initial profiles based on Bar memberships - since I've been a member of 3 different state bar associations there were three separate profiles for me) so I went ahead and did that. Apparently, all of me combined equals 6.3 on the AVVO scale.

With broadband and a decent computer and the plethora of clips on the intertubes these days you can attend all kinds of conferences from the comfort of your desk. You don't get the random, interactive meeting and greeting of physically being there but virtual attendance is a a heck of a lot cheaper (free). I watched a ton of Walter Mossberg's All Things D conference via video clips. I'm catching up a bit on Kevin Werbach's recent Supernova conference the same way.

It's been interesting to see social networking sites evolve across the intertubes. Most of the attention goes to the biggest ones like Youtube, MySpace and Facebook but there's countless niche sites making a go of it. I just discovered one called Avvo that focuses on lawyers. Actually it's not clear how much of a "social" networking site it's going to be - it seems to be very focused on providing "rankings" - presumably to assist consumers with making decisions on acquiring legal services.

David Isen brought his Freedom to Connect conference to DC again, but unfortunately I wasn't able to get out of the office at all to attend. By most accounts I've read online, it was another very interesting group of folks attending the two day event. David's opening remarks to the conference are here (wherein he name-checked one of my colleagues Bob Cannon.  Nice!).

I just found a Wikipedia entry for KCPR, the college radio station I worked at while attending Cal Poly. I live in Washington DC now and it's a joy that I have such a short commute because local radio stations are really bland here. It seems that outside of all-talk style radio, nobody on the air is allowed to have an authentic personality anymore. It was completely different working on-air at KCPR where it seemed to me that I lived and died - every shift- largely by the seat of my pants.

It's been quite awhile since Larry Lessig penned Code, but not quite as long since he released an updated version of it (Code 2.0). A pdf version of it is available online here. I'm rereading the whole thing since it's been so long.

I recently attended some of Freedom2Connect, a 2 day conference put on by David Isen.

After nearly a decade working on domestic telecommunications issues, I've decided to try something new.  I am now Special Counsel in the International Bureau.  I am working in the Multilateral Branch of the Strategic Negotiations Division if you're interested in the fine print. Looking out at the rest of the world is a fantastic new perspective and I'm really enjoying the work so far.  It's also a fantastic group of people occupying this part of the Federal Communications Commission and they've made the transition fairly easy for me. When I put up this site, I mentioned I wasn't going to