Neil Gaiman's Journal

One of the sequences I really wanted to put into American Gods but that never made it was the Mermaids of Weeki Wachee.... . I wonder if I can squeeze them into Anansi Boys. It's not really about the same things (although it shares one character) but bits of it are set in Florida, and there's something about those mermaids that ought to be in a book...

Bad Neil! Wicked Neil!

Didn�t you know that �to google� is infringing on Google�s(tm)
trademark?

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/25/1943247&mode=nested&tid=133
Just teasing, naturally, but would enjoy your thoughts on the matter.

--Bill^2, aka �Bill from the Well�

I wonder if they'll get the worms back into the can. On the one hand, if you don't protect your trademark you lose it. Aspirin and Heroin were once brand names, after all, and Coca-Cola make very sure that no-one gets to enjoy a coke and a smile in books these days. But Google exists in an internet culture where sending this website a letter explaining I'll be sued unless I replace the phrase "I googled but couldn't figure out who the current prime minister of Nauru is" with " I searched using the GOOGLE (TM) Search Engine but couldn't find out who the current prime minister of Nauru is" would be both silly and impractical, simply because the internet tends to be an astonishingly informal medium.

I wonder if they'll make Bill Gibson revise later editions of Pattern Recognition.