I was reading over the ABA’s Blawg 100 yesterday, and I had a thought about blogging, and what it is as a medium (and what it is not). After I finished crying and screaming that I wasn’t on the list (!!), I was struck by a few things. First, this is not to say that I do all of these things, but it’s soooo much easier to be a critic than a performer, so:
Anyone can put up a page, and any webpage can contain content that’s updated. That is not something new with the “blogging” phenomenon.
- Blogging is never a finished product. Blogs are only interesting because they are a rough cut. It’s always ongoing, and a good blog is so current that it is a “rough cut” by necessity.
- It’s you and the blogger having a beer, where much, if not all of the pretense is dropped. Opinions aren’t only allowed, but encouraged. Objective analysis, clean language, and even punctuation are for formal articles. Part of the blog experience is feeling “inside.”
- In that vein, what drives eyeballs to blogs is the value added by the mind of the blogger, not the commodity content of what the blogger is commenting on.
- These last three in connection make the difference between a website that say, just posts a series of case summaries like a 1L’s brief, and a blog that adds a lawyers experience, insight, or reaction to the case.
- Blogging is not, in the end, a vehicle for press releases or marketing. It can be part of a broader marketing system, but readers have little impetus to return to a blog that doesn’t have value-added blog-style rough cut commentary, unless you are the quickest, freest, and most up-to-date site. In other words, unless you’re prepared to be the Wal-Mart of webpages or compete and win against the Wal-Mart of webpages, you have to compete instead as a Whole Foods or find a niche.
This is why blogging is tough for attorneys. We are always cautious with public pronouncements, and certainly wouldn’t want to criticize, say, a judge we have to appear before, and we really can’t talk about quite a few things. If that limits you too much, then chances are what you’ve got is a webpage with case summaries, not a blog. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s just not part of what this medium is.
Some of the best blogs, legal or not, often have quite a few one line entries. I’m far too talkative for that, but it’s something worth noting.
