The River

I’ve been so wrapped up in the latest project I’ve been involved with at FM that I haven’t had time to post about it: the FM Holiday Gadget Guide.

Though it’s sponsored solely by Best Buy, the FM authors involved — some of the Web’s most well-known gadget aficionados — have complete free range, editorially. I’ve gotten a real kick out of reading their posts, and have developed a hankering for a couple of things featured. Anyway, it’s been fun, and it’ll be up and running through the end of the year.

Great news for community-oriented publishers from the California Supreme Court yesterday. In case you missed it, the court held that a Web site’s operator shouldn’t be held responsible for libelous content written by others that appears on that site. This just protects the status quo, of course, but should have bloggers and other custodians of free-wheeling discussion sites breathing a sigh of relief. (The Merc has a copy of the decision (PDF) online.)

“Hold all my calls, I’m blogging….”

I got to visit my old conference-attending life today (without the responsibility of writing stories, thankfully), and am hanging out at the Web 2.0 Summit this afternoon. A few highlights…

* Google’s Marissa Mayer talking about the importance of speed, and nearly-instantaneous feedback.

* Digg’s Kevin Rose showing off an example of how the company is letting developers create innovative interfaces to the amazing amount of data that the site’s users are creating every minute.

* The teen/parent panel, masterfully moderated by Safa Rashtchy, in which ordinary people shared their personal experiences of the Internet. Surprises included how many of these folks are using Firefox. One was even using Opera. But, in other cases, I was surprised at the lack of sophistication. Only 2 had heard of, or used, Skype, for example. The kids spend an outrageous amount of time on MySpace (my teenage niece and nephew’s addiction is Bebo), but that’s not a huge surprise. But spending hours regularly updating your page, so the kids at school the next day will compliment you? Wow. (Like I should talk…. sitting here blogging.)

So, I’m hanging around this afternoon at the party FM is sponsoring. Hope to see folks I know there, including FM Authors. In contrast to other conferences I’ve been to, the attendance here still seems to be very strong, though it’s 5:20 p.m. on the last day of the show. Impressive.

Since one of the most popular ways people find this site is via a search for “Ricky Gervais Podcast” (which takes them to this post), I feel compelled to note that Fred’s discovered Ricky’s podcast is free again. Yippee!