Blogging

There’s a lengthy discussion on Real Lawyers Have Blogs on Why a law blog does not belong inside your law firm website.

For me it boils down to this. Effective blogging is you – or a group including you – (as Kevin says) “providing valuable information, insight, and commentary to your target audience”, so don’t hide that within “the trappings of a law firm website”. That does not mean you have to publish it at its own domain, but it does mean that it should have its own identity separate from the law firm brochureware, news items and worthy articles.

That’s an easy – even automatic – choice for the sole practitioner or the small firm specialist; it’s not so easy for those in large firms who are conditioned or feel they are required to speak for the firm.

So it’s tempting for the larger firm to go for the comfort of extending the existing website CMS to produce blogs integrated into the firm’s website, but all that produces is more featureless, unengaging web pages with little or no Google juice added.

What’s needed is to do something different – to push the boat out, to engage and connect – and the best way to do that is to create a platform that the bloggers own in spirit if not in law

An article in this week’s Economist concludes:

Gone, in other words, is any sense that blogging as a technology is revolutionary, subversive or otherwise exalted, and this upsets some of its pioneers. Confirmed, however, is the idea that blogging is useful and versatile. In essence, it is a straightforward content-management system that posts updates in reverse-chronological order and allows comments and other social interactions. Viewed as such, blogging may “die” in much the same way that personal-digital assistants (PDAs) have died. A decade ago, PDAs were the preserve of digerati who liked using electronic address books and calendars. Now they are gone, but they are also ubiquitous, as features of almost every mobile phone.

That blogging has gone mainstream may disappoint some early adopters who might have wished their turf to have remained unsullied. However, it was hardly unexpected. Put a useful technology out there and all sorts of people will find all sorts of uses for it. Remember the web itself circa 1995?

(Hat tip: John Naughton)

I’m not going to take the linkbait laid by Paul Boutin in Wired Magazine telling us to quit blogging because the blogosphere has been “flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge” and that time is “better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter”. This has got a lot of coverage … because it’s bilge.

I don’t know about you, but I find it difficult to write anything on Flickr, Facebook is fine for socialising and Twitter is great for chat – and you can use them effectively for more serious purposes too; but they’re different tools and don’t do what blogging does. So Paul Boutin can take his bilge elsewhere and I will continue blogging because it suits me.

Dave Winer, pioneer of blogging, RSS and other publishing standards, recently posted about the importance of blogs as a publishing platform:

Publishing keeps getting cheaper. That’s been the constant push, the practical application of Moore’s Law in my neck of the woods. I’ve always been a publishing guy, and that’s always been how I viewed computers, and it’s why I got into them in the first place. Most people don’t get this, the real story of blogging is just the continuation of the process. … Blogging is the leading edge in publishing in the first decade of this century.

I too am a “publishing guy” and continue to promote here the merits of the blog as a publishing platform for the legal world , as does Kevin O’Keefe – most recently:

Whether you’re Thomson West publishing legal treatises, ALM publishing legal periodicals, a law firm publishing newsletters, or a law professor publishing law review articles, you ought to be looking at blogging as a very cost effective means of publishing. In addition to reduced costs, blogs offer a means of distributing content. Content that is also more timely than that published in traditional fashion.

Dave and Kevin link to supporting comments from Clay Shirky (of Here Comes Everybody fame). Clay’s argument was that the concept of blogging would become less important as the range of publishing activity enabled by the blog platform expanded.

The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless.

But it’s interesting to note that Clay’s comments are actually from an interview in April 2004. So, in the context of that time, he was clearly wrong: “blogs” and “blogging” exploded thereafter. His assertion makes more sense today – now that blogging has become “normal”. But while it’s true we’re less likely to talk of newsletters, collections of articles etc as blogs just because they use blog technology, to my mind “blogging” will live on as the term used to define the “naked conversations” which have popularised the medium.

From an amusing piece by Jeffrey Goldberg on advice he received on becoming a blogger:

A blogger should only post, when he has “something new to add to something old,” and has “something that no one else has.” Do not “post for the sake of posting. Resist the temptation – and boy is it a temptation – to blog because your audience expects to read something.” This last bit of advice presupposes the existence for me of an audience. On this exact point, another of our fine bloggers, Ross Douthat, offered me this piece of advice: “Don’t check your traffic.”

Regarding news reporting, Scott Karp puts it like this:

Has there ever in the history of niche media been so many news organizations writing about the same thing at the exact same time? … makes you wonder why some news orgs don’t just link to the story that’s already been published and go write about something else that nobody knows about – you know, news.