Transcript Bloggership: The Role of the Law Professor Blogger

Bloggership: The Role of the Law
Professor Blogger
A. Michael Froomkin
University of Miami School of Law
April 28, 2006
Framing
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I do three types of blogging
Activist: ICANNWatch.org (1999)
 “Personal”: Discourse.net (2003)
 Teacher: several classroom blogs at
umlaw.net (2004)
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They each taught me something
But First, A Warning
“The plural of anecdote is ‘Blog’”
-- Alex Harrowell,
http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/002493.php
This Medium is Not a Message
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‘Blog’ is about easy packaging of existing
tools
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Part of an ecology of tools
Listservers are not dead
 Very dependant on underlying layers
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Vulnerable to comment & trackback spam
Is It Even a Medium?
Are blogs more like magazines ?
 Or, to use, TV metaphor, a form like a
sitcom or the local news
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The Case for Blogs as Special
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Tools do shape content
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Blogs are popular – and that matters:
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‘Power corrupts – and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely’
‘Quantity has a quality all its own’
Technoquirks
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Orin’s “RCO” – reverse chronological order
Links
Comments
Trackbacks
Google rankings, TLB Ecosystem, Technorati
The long tail, the ‘A’ List, ‘B’ list, etc.
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Not so new, but never so evident (cf. Caron) – is this what we
value now?
How different is the hierarchy (as evidenced by this event) from
the one that we had before?
Is There a Blog ‘Voice’?
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Blogging vs. law review articles
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Blog discipline
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Informal
No editors
Links instead of footnotes
Continual feedback (hits, links vs. placement)
Not ‘undisciplined’ but very different from the law
journals, books, treatises world
I write differently in each type of blog (and
again in law review articles)
What Are Blogs Good For (I)
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Activism
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Making Visible (“Bully pulpit”)
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Specialist
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ICANNWatch
Organizing
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Mau-mauing the MSM
Campaign tools
Bearing Witness
“Public Intellectual”
Out-of-sub-discipline scholarship
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Torture memos
What Are Blogs Good For (II)
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Awareness
Bashman, Solum
 In-field
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Lots of tech blogs, IP blogs
 Where are the adlaw blogs?
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Out of field
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Mirror of Justice
Error detection
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E.g. Eric Muller & Greg Robinson on Malkin's In
Defense of Internment
What Blogs Are Not So Good For
This event is not being conducted on a
blog
 Traditional Treatises
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(but see wikis)
 Heriot disagrees ??
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Details
Footnotes do have value
 Footnotes may even be the key to lawyers’
claim to belonging in universities instead of
trade schools.
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Is Something Missing?
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Things that work
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Activist? √
Recent development awareness (cases, crises) √
Hot newsy topical discussion √
But filtering of academic writing is still uneven,
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What’s new in the law reviews? What should I
read?
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SRRN is only very lightly filtered
And, there’s Larry Solum
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But Larry reads too much
So none of this is exactly the filtering I want…
What I Plan to Do About It:
JOTWELL
“The Journal of What We Like
(Lots)”
Jotwell.com
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Short (2-4pp) reviews of academic work
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Explaining why it’s worth reading
Appreciations of new contributions, maybe situating
them in a literature
An intermediary between readers and the torrent of
SSRN / BePress & journals
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Maybe the occasional re-appreciation of a classic
Bloggy: Room for comments and discussion
Not bloggy: will not publish too often
Organizational issue: general interest or some
topical division?
What It Is Not
Not the legal version of the Journal of
Economic Literature
 Not review articles of a topic
 Not about what is in other blogs
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Not even their scholarly contributions
 …at least in version 1.0
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Why Write for Jotwell?
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You read the article
You loved the article
You want to draw attention to the article
Law reviews don’t publish “book reviews” of
articles
 Our profession over-values “critique” and
under-celebrates what deserves praise
 By calling attention to interesting new
scholarship, you can help promote interesting
discussions, in the best traditions of the
academy
Thank you
[email protected]
http://www.discourse.net
http://www.icannwatch.org
… and, soon, http://www.jotwell.com