Wow!!! I'm #10 on Google!. How the heck can that happen! Who in the right mind would come here?

I discovered the funniest thing today: It turns out there's two Calblogs. This is funny because I was just contemplating the matter of property rights in the blogosphere. Albeit in a slightly differed category than this situation - I was pondering who owns the posts published on a team blog? Surely, if the blog's owner were paying the contributors, the matter would be given some attention, just as it is in traditional media. I was about to write Eugene and ask him if they had any agreement on that at The Volokh Conspiracy.

But anyway, as for this deal with Justine and I: I'm not upset or anything. I mean, the name is my property, but it's not like I use it much. It's like that old car that you couldn't force yourself to take the lousy offer the dealer made on trade-in when you bought your new one: you brought it home, stuck it in the garage, and never did get around to selling it. So, save for an occasional spin down to the beach to keep things loose and spinning, it just sits there taking up space. The wife keeps prodding you to shed that large piece of excess baggage, even throwing out such enticing ideas as using the money from the sale to convert the half of half of the garage now empty into a comfy, opulent yet elegant office/den, where you can sit in that buttery-soft chestnut leather on hand-carved Black Hickory wingback you've always wanted, and puff away on your Cohibas with no noise from the kids and no harping about the smoke from her. (Reality check: How many of you have previous cars that would even nearly cover the cost of this sort of conversion. And how many of you have wives that would actually allow you to use either the money or the garage space for anything that you are even remotely interested in?).

And I'm not looking at this as some chance to strong-arm somebody. That's not my way. And frankly, as a fellow blogger, fostering a friendship with her is far more important then the exacting some windfall profit.

But the primary focus of my fascination at this moment is the question of what possessed Justene to choose a name that someone else had already laid claim too? Perhaps she has some emotional attachment to the name, which predates her Blogger blog. And, not envisioning the blogosphere, or her blog in particular, to be as big as they have become, she just used the Or perhaps it was CalNewsBlog when she first started it, and then, leaving everything alone, she just changed the label on the skin, without considering the possibility of the name’s previous commitment?

But that was the old Blogger blog. She’s gone bigtime now, and has a proper Movable Type powered board. And look, she’s taken CALBLOG for her domain name as well. Whatever happened with those people who were buying up all the URL's with popular corporate names?

And do I even own the Calblog name? What does one have to do to establish ownership of a blog name?

Whatever. A little sleep and a little phone conversation with Justene, and everything will seem much clearer.