SEZ WHO? SEZ ME.
The New World Of Blogging
A favorite spot for world travelers is the Speakers’ Corner of Hyde Park in London. It’s long been the capital of soapbox, with speakers who feel they have a burning message for the world, and causes to espouse, and ideas that come from every corner of the mind. On nice Sunday afternoons, it’s the fountain of education in the human condition, from every political side to every religious concept. It may even have been the birthplace of the latest fad word – passion.
It was the capital of soapbox – until now. Now we have the blog – the personal web log. It is everyman’s (and woman’s) access to the public eye and mind. Easy to do, easy to set up, inexpensive, easy to post for even the most technically challenged, it allows anybody with something to say, no matter how bright, no matter how clever, no matter how foolish or inane, to spread ideas and dictum to the world. According to a recent survey by Perseus, there are now some 4.12 million hosted blogs – an astonishing growth in just a very few years. Not all will sustain, of course, nor will a great many of them have universal appeal or legs. A surprisingly large number, though, will grow and have impact and increasing value, and will most likely last. Their burgeoning is testimony to Esther Dyson’s recent observation that internet growth is accelerated by the internet itself. Technology, she says, scales rapidly upward. And so it has with blogs.
An outgrowth of web sites and online magazines, such as The Marcus Letter, a blog is a different breed of communication beast, and a new species bred of the internet. It’s a highly specialized and focused personal web site, affording the blogger an outlet to express feelings and ideas that are untempered and unedited by anyone other than the blogger. And there’s the rub. Truly a marketplace of ideas like no other in history, and that’s good. Nor are all blogs news reporting endeavors. There’s opinion and instruction and hobby sharing. There’s information and misinformation. There’s light as well as darkness. Truly the marketplace in which ideas are tested. A blog can be trivial or profound, and because there is no professional editor, it can be excessive or outrageous. Or it can also be informative and useful. But it can be bad, as well, because it can inundate undiscriminating readers with garbage as well as truth and ideas. But that, after all, is what the marketplace of ideas is about, isn’t it?
In just the short while in the brief history of blogs, blogging has already made profound changes in journalism, politics, and ultimately, perhaps, in other fields as well. Originally just a personal diary and personal opinion expressed without fear or favor, it’s now become institutionalized, and an integral part of the communication matrix. It is now, as well, a new phenomenon in the world of commerce, as advertising begins to creep in.
Blogging seems to upset some professional journalists, who are annoyed, perhaps, because they get edited and bloggers don’t. And maybe because some of the non-professional journalists are better communicators than the professionals. Most likely, though, it’s because – as Professor Jay Rosen of NYU points out – “In the mainstream media it’s the press talking to the reader. With blogs and the internet, it’s the reader talking back.” It's likely that the blog's ability to supply unfettered information, often going deeper than the traditional press, and often well before the traditional press publishes the same information, may ultimately alter the nature of journalism itself.
In fact, blogging is just one battle in the battle of the communication revolution. The internet itself has changed the news cycle, from one published edition to the next. Now, courtesy of the internet -- and blogs as well -- the news cycle is instantaneous, or at least hourly. Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor and Supreme Court correspondent for Slate, writes in Law.Com's United States Supreme Court Monitor blog, "For the most part, however, the news of the day in the courtroom comes filtered through the eyes and ears of the clutch of reporters permitted [to do so]. The Internet is rapidly changing that." The Internet, she points out, is rapidly changing all that. In the world of Internet news, she says, tomorrow morning was simply to long to wait for the news. "The Internet has utterly collapsed the notion of a 'news cycle'." In fact, she notes, the Court has begun to take the web seriously, and rather than reportes or others having to go to the library for transcripts, they are now available on line.
Moreover, she points out, that blogs create a fundamentally democratic community of voices in which there are not rules dictating page length, credentials of writers, or which letters make the cut. With blogs, stories don't end end upon publication, they get their start there.
But the head of the journalism department at one university scoffed that blogging is “…the flavor of the month…a fad.” Not in his lifetime, I think. Not with an estimated 4 million blogs now online, and some 32 million people (according to The Wall Street Journal) accessing them. Nor has traditional journalism covered itself with a mantle of objectivity and clarity in fulfilling its role of informing a democratic society. It was blogs – not the traditional press -- that played a key role in exposing the false documents about President Bush’s military service on 60 Minutes, and blogs that changed the nature of political action and fund raising during the 2004 presidential campaign, and blogs that contributed to the defeat of John Kerry. Hardly a fad.
Blogs altered for the long term the way in which political campaigns will be waged. The world of blogs had been growing during the last few years, but the presidential campaign of 2004 catapulted the blog into prominence. It moved the blog from the realm of mere diary to a serious source of news, information, and opinion. The immediacy of publication, as with all else on the internet, is the phenomenon that soars beyond the printed word. The technical ability to bring in real time news gives weight to even the most trivial blog.
Blogging will change things -- but what, and when, and how? Too early to tell. But change it has and change it will.
While personal diaries that found their way into the public domain are not new – even the famous diarist Samuel Pepys and Boswell were predated by the ancients – the blog phenomenon seems to bring new dimension to the medium. Blogs are of the internet born, and they give the blogger an audience unlike any other in the history of communication. Most blogs are now still personal diaries, but the blog itself is a now major vehicle for information, news, informed opinion, and even commerce.
The key to the success of the blog is not just the ease with which anybody can do it, but the technology itself. The blogging software is readily and inexpensively available, and requires no great technical skill. It’s such internet rooted factors as the link, for example, that gives even the most mundane blog depth and authority and information unmatched in the history of communication. New technology gives bloggers direct access to news sources through RSS (Really Simple Syndication -- a technology that brings current news directly into a blog sites), lending more weight and value to blogs. One click of the mouse and your world opens up to other material.
And ultimately, the ability of any individual to raise his or her voice and be heard, unedited, unvarnished, unfettered, is the awesome factor that can move worlds by adding myriad voices to once-privileged public discourse.
At the same time, the sheer utility of blogs allow them to serve higher and more valuable purpose. The insider sharing scarce information. The voice with an axe to grind and the political observer with no axe to grind but that of the truth. The myth maker and the myth buster.
Aside from political blogs, few areas have produced more interesting, valuable and sophisticated material than the legal profession. You have only to look at the growing number of blogs for and by lawyers to realize that the massive power of law bloggers can ultimately influence the law itself, and certainly its practice.. Law firm blogs report on techniques of practice management, practice news, practice gossip and practice techniques. Led by a long list of pioneers, such as Monica Bay (The Common Scold), The Volokh Conspiracy, Andy Havens, Dennis Kennedy, Bruce MacEwen, Larry Bodine, Jerry Lawson, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Robert Ambrogi, and many others, the network of law firm bloggers has blossomed. And these blogs link to many more good blogs. Michael Goldblatt, a lawyer and leading marketing expert, was an early proponent of blogs. Law.com, the website of American Lawyer Media, now has a number of blogs to which they link regularly as affiliates (see list following this article).
A body of knowledge about what works and doesn’t is emerging – if amorphous. The techniques are best learned by logging on to a number of sites, and getting a feel for it. Unlike print media, or even web sites, the variety of styles, format and content are too varied to codify – and that may be one of the appealing aspects of blogs.
Blogs by individual lawyers within a firm extend the value of a firm web site by focusing on a specific practice, and updating it daily if needed. (Oddly, while there are now hundreds of law firm and lawyer blogs, there seem to be comparatively few account firm blogs.) These highly focused blogs can be intensely informative about specific practices. And obviously, by demonstrating expertise, they serve as powerful marketing tools.
One new question arising from the proliferation of blogs is the ownership of content. Blogs frequently go beyond authors' opinions to include information from elsewhere. Blogs are frequently written from within firms or corporations. Is there a copyright problem here? Who owns content that isn't absolutely original with the writer? Who owns the content that comes from an RSS feed? If a lawyer or a corporate employee writes a blog from within the firm or company, does the writer own the content, or does the law firm or employer? So far, there are different answers from different companies, but the problem is far from totally solved.
An inevitable step, as blogging audiences grew and content became more valuable, was the growth of advertising on blogs. At a recent iBreakfast meeting on The Business of Blogging, the subject was addressed by a group of blog advertising executives. The iBreakfast meetings (www.ibreakfast.com), run by the remarkable Alan Brody, bring the most significant names in all aspects of the internet world to discuss matters of most immediate concern in the field.
At the meeting, four executives in the field raised the question of whether money can be made by this new phenomenon. They noted that some pundits, like Joshua Micah Marshall, can pull in as much as $10,000 a month in ad revenue. The payout, when there is one, is more like the $18,000 annual salary that the Wonkette, Anna Marie Cox, makes from her popular blend of political commentary. “Generally,” the panelists noted, “what separates the money-making bloggers from the purported 2 million who also commit their thoughts to the Web, is a connection to other media, such as a newspaper column (Marshall) or a TV show (O'Reilly).”
Henry Copeland, founder of Blogads, said he hopes to capitalize on this by becoming an aggregator of ad placements for bloggers, a kind of new-era Doubleclick. He takes much less of a chunk than Doubleclick does with banner advertisers and he says the page views are growing to somewhere in the range of 50 million a month. The NY Times, he says, is doing about 400 million.
Stowe Boyd, Corante CEO, put the blogging businesses into perspective by describing the idea of a knowing conversation where experts rise to the top and become much sought after. The idea is that the "wisdom of the crowd" confers status and you can measure that by the number of links a blogger generates which in turns raises their Google rankings.
One element, says Brody, is the easy reach of experts. It’s much easier to find them. They can be consulted or employed with little friction and no intermediaries. Companies can use blogs as a way for their technicians and customers to establish rapport and to provide better customer. While there may be obvious downsides for troubled companies, the upside is compelling, such as when Macromedia discovered through bloggers that if they did not have a product in the space they would lose clients. They used the blogs to get the message out that they would participate with new products. As Boyd pointed out, Microsoft maintains over 1,000 blogs, so this is now mainstream in technology companies.
David Teten, a noted consultant with NitronAdvisors and author of The Digital Handshake, described the overall space where smart players have turned into experts using RSS feeds. “Bloggers are media agnostic,” he said. “They will link to any source whereas publications shy away from linking to their competitors. Savvy viewers are latching on to them and using bloggers as an interpretive source as well as a meta-view of the industry.” But he also sees the digital presence as a status issue too, that it will become the measure of a company and the measure of person. It is how they will seek work, employees and business opportunities. It is also a way, said A1 Technology’s Ishwari Singh, for management to monitor the output of their technical staff by getting their blogs on a RSS feed. It may even be, as Copeland said, for those whose online presence is lacking, "A prosthetic device for your entire being."
On the one hand, blogs are just another medium, a tool, a marketing device. On the other hand blogs are the communication phenomenon of our era, with a prospective importance not yet fully recognized. Certainly, no such phenomenon has grown so quickly in penetrating its audience.
An inevitable question is whether The Marcus Letter is a blog or a straightforward web site or an online magazine. By traditional standards, probably not a blog. Started in 1998, following several years as a printed newsletter, its readership is probably larger than any other publication’s in professional services marketing, but it’s not about news, nor is it the simple how-to found so widely elsewhere – it’s about thinking – about getting to the essence of professional services marketing. And yes, it is a blog, because it represents mostly my personal views and experience, and because it’s updated on no fixed schedule. But whether The Marcus Letter is a blog or not doesn’t really matter. It’s what it is, for your enjoyment and edification.
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The Law.com blog affiliates…
Volokh Conspiracy
May
It Please The Court