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Blogging
Whew. I'm done.
I just let the time pass, leaving no entry on the archives calendar for August 13, 2007. On June 5, I decided to start blogging at least once per day until the end of the summer. Now, school doesn't start for another week, but it was time to let this go. Now I've got the blemish on the calendar. No more struggling to get a post out if I can't find anything meaningful to say.
I'm sure that won't mean an end to meaningless posts. But then, what truly is meaningless? Today, someone arrived on the site via a Google search for "paul anka freedom american gilmore". As it happens, this site comes up first in such a search. Can a post be meaningless if some lost soul comes to it from the vastness of the Internet?
Earlier, I posted with a fairly abrasive title, suggesting that a newsletter about blawgging that is available only by email struck me as odd. The newsletter publisher, Sheryl Sisk Schelin, of blawg The Inspired Solo, posted some thoughtful responses as comments on the original.
I bring this back up largely to address the thought more completely.
The title of the post was, "How to convince me you don't get it." (emphasis added.) I completely understand her points. Chunks of my day job have been spent proselytizing on the benefits of syndication and "Web 2.0." Other chunks of my day job have been spent wedging email notifications into products where moderately flexible feed notifications exist. I understand that it's a small community that truly gets feeds.
That it's a small community that gets it is precisely why I feel that those pushing blogs (and blawgs) should be utilizing the technologies to their utmost. That readers may not all use feed readers or even understand what that means, however, doesn't diminish the importance of using feeds for publishing. It makes it more important!
There are tools, such as Feedburner Email, to allow the recalcitrant users to subscribe to feed-based publications via email. There are tools in most publishing platforms to do the same. It's certainly possible to publish by feed and allow subscriptions via email, all without the user knowing what's going on at all. But more importantly, surely part of that publication will be education, and what better way to educate a user about the feed than to give examples of the the precise content they're looking at as a feed?
Obviously, publishers may publish however they want. However, in my opinion, if one truly gets and values syndications and feeds, it only makes sense to publish everything appropriate via feed and to make allowances for others when needs arise.
Introducing the Inspired Blawggers Newsletter!:
You might notice, if you're reading this on the blog's website, that I've got a new addition to the sidebar - a prominent link to a new page where you can sign up to join the newly minted Inspired Blawggers newsletter mailing list!This newsletter is going to feature all new content - stuff you won't find on Inspired Solo or anywhere else, for that matter. Articles written exclusively for the newsletter will include a host of topics of interest to lawyers who blog:
"I will inspire you to be a better blawgger by forcing you to sign up for an email newsletter."
For those of us who realize the benefits of syndication, the notion of being forced into email newsletters is crazy. Email doesn't allow for the richness, the linking, the sharing, or the cataloging that syndicated web content does. There is really only one compelling reason to make this sort of move: identification of readers to advertisers. That's hidden in code here: "in addition to new and exclusive content, subscribers will also receive advance notice of new services and products from Inspired Consulting. . . ." But then there's my favorite: "regular “best of the blog” feature where I’ll highlight some of the most useful posts at The Inspired Solo since the last newsletter was issued."
Tell me again how an email newsletter is supposed to inspire me about blogging? And please, tell me how seriously I'm supposed to take a blogger who resorts to a an email newsletter for content distribution.
Whew.
If you look at the archive calendar on the right for July 2007, you'll notice that every day has an entry. On June 5, I set out with a goal of some meaningful post each day. I've had to settle for a post every day since. There have been some popular posts in that time, and there have been some that have had to undergo several revisions as I rushed to get them out by the day's deadline.
I may continue this push until school starts; I may not. Quality over quantity is a better goal. If I can't get out something meaningful each day, it probably doesn't make sense to post. In the next few days, I do expect to make some changes:
- A new name. I'm still trying to decide.
- A new look. I've been working on new themes.
- Integration with my Google Reader Shared Items and my del.icio.us tagged items.
- A Drupal upgrade. This should be invisible to users, unless I screw it up. However, I do plan on integrating Drupal's OpenID support for my small community of commenters.
More when it happens.
It's been nearly 2 years since I last looked at what brings people here. To be sure, there have been some decided traffic changes. For one thing, my regular readership is much greater than it has been. I know this in part because Google Analytics tells me that since the first of the year, 32.27% of my site's visitors are returning visitors. (Mint tells me something similar, but I've only been using it a month.) The numbers for the last month show only a 24.85% return rate. However, I've had my highest visitor counts ever in the last month.
Anyhow, in a practice that those of us who follow our web access logs tend to do, I'll now arbitrarily elaborate on some of the searches that have led people here over the last 4 months.
Some things never change. 3.73% of my visitors since the start of the year came through a search for "Coalition of Concerned Legal Professionals." That search usually leads to this page.
3.32% of my visitors search for "otherwise occupied." That leads to the homepage, generally. Following the clickstream, it's clear that that's how some people find me. For others, I gather they're just sorely disappointed.
Searches regarding USF are huge, and they also produce very interested readers. Rather than type this up, or try to analyze the various ways people search for USF information end up here, below is a screen capture. I'd just like to do a little editorializing first. Look at all of this! This is clearly information people want. Wouldn't it make sense for the school to publish this information online?
The final one is my favorite. It's "romero exception." It brings up my first blog post. There are 7 requests, all from California. 6 from USF. We seem to have the market cornered on Romero Exception teaching.
It's been a busy couple of weeks here on haverkamp.com. Not busy by truly busy website standards, but certainly busy compared to what we normally see around here.
The traffic has pretty much all concerned my post on the proposed ABA standards interpretation for 301(a). At first, it was just a small bump, when the post garnered a mention at Legal Underground. Then on Friday, everything went nuts... Well, nuts for around here.
Someone apparently took my post and started spreading it around to various forums. The biggest traffic generator appears to have been Jd Undergound. The always lovely AutoAdmit.com picked it up, also generating more traffic to my about page than I had previously seen. Finally, someone posted it in a comment on Above the Law, which caused a reader to suggest that I stop "linkwhoring [my] pathetic blog." Wasn't me, pal. This must be the kind of stuff the A-listers see written about themselves everyday.
Since then, I've seen a lot of ripples. The post appears to be running through mailing lists at various California law schools. At first, there were lots of Whittiers. Then came the Chapmans. Today, oddly, was a string of Santa Claras.
What sort of impact are we talking about? Here's a graph for the last few weeks. The first bump is from Legal Underground. The second is the array of Friday bumps.
On February 14, I noted that after 3 months, Akismet, which I use to filter spam from comments here, had blocked 100 comment spam. The rate was roughly 33 per month.
Today, 4 months later, that rate is over 100 per month. The ironic part about this is that the comment spam has increased even as my blogging output has decreased. I had assumed that they would key off changing content, as that would seem to indicate more of a userbase. While they do seem to key off of particular content (anecdotally, this is the page most commonly spammed), they don't seem to care about new content or rate of change at all.
I'd suggest that slower turnover is better, because it could potentially indicate a site administrator who's not overly in touch with the blog. However, states from Scoble and Arrington seem to suggest that their substantially more popular and changing blogs are spammed at a much greater frequency, not counted in hundreds per month, but in hundreds per hour or more.
Based on the content, I assume it is still largely out to game the search engines by linking all over creation. Right now, I just let Akismet delete it after 24 hours. Akismet has yet to turn up a false positive -- given my low rate of comments, this is not a huge endorsement, however -- and only misses the occasional spam. If my numbers were bigger, I'm sure I'd be much less thrilled.
Clearly, something needs to be done about this scourge of bots that allows spammers to operate so freely.
Introduction
On April 16, 2007, Judah Nathanson and I will be making our Legal Ethics presentation on "Attorney Blawgging." This post contains our reading assignment for that presentation. There are three parts to this assignment. The first provides some general background on blogs, blogging, and the area we as future attorneys are most concerned about, attorney blawgging. If you're already familiar with blogs and blawgs, you may not need to spend much time on this part. The second part is the meatiest and covers attorney advertising rules and how those impact blawgging by attorneys. Finally, the third part covers attorney-client relationships and other concerns.
Part I: Blogs, Blogging, and Blawgging
We would prefer to spend little of our class time discussing the basics of blogs and what makes them different from traditional websites. If you're unfamilarly with blogs, or if you only know that you might read them on occasion, please read the following:
- Read Wikipedia's Blog entry
- Read this blog post on blog syndication.
Next, focus a bit more on the world of legal blogging, often referred to as "blawgging." There are several directories of blawggers. For many examples of attorney blawgs, see this directory. (Note that they use one 'g'; other uses two. We're using two.) The company powering this directory, Justia, is in the business of selling marketing solutions to law firms, including a blawgging platform.
Part II: Attorney Advertising
Advertising is the space where blawgging is most directly restricted.
California
First, consider the California State Bar Act:
- Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6157, particularly (c) and (d).
- Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6157.3
- Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 6158
And then, the California Rules of Professional Conduct:
- Rule 1-400, in particular (A), (C), (D), and (F)
Finally, the following CalBar Formal Opinion on the status of websites:
ABA Model Rules
Kentucky
New York
The displinary rules covering attorney advertising have been a hot topic of conversation over the last 9 months. See the following for the details and the redline version of the rules as adopted:
Part III: Confidentiality, Attorney-Client Relationships, and Other Concerns
I received a request today to blog more. What's more, if I took the appropriate implication, I'm supposed to tone down tech content. I thought I had!
All I can say is I'll try. I know it's been slow lately. I've been very focused on the paper I'm doing in Cyberspace Law. I'm knee-deep in Katzian Fourth Amendment, wiretap and electronic surveillance laws, and electronic surveillance technology. I just submitted the first draft of my outline today, though I've already started to rethink some of the organization and, perhaps, the need for one of assertions I thought was so wonderful.
Perhaps I should have asked for more information about the content type that's desired. More "Gilmore Girls"? More riffs on professors? There hasn't been a trespasser recently. There was a very dressed-for-going-out woman who rapped on the lounge door Saturday night, apologized, then ran off in the vicinity of either the Law Review or SBA offices. She came back crawling around the floor, moving and looking under all the furniture. I asked what she was looking for, and she responded, "It's kind of hard to explain." That really piqued my curiosity, but I went back to Westlaw.
I would love to make a good carpetbagger reference here and there, too. However, I do know what a carpetbagger is, and that makes it more difficult to work it into conversation.
How was that?
These people start off with such great feedback, yet they follow-up with all sorts of URLs!
"See you...Thanks, its great to receive such positive comments."
"This is a cool site! Thanks and wish you better luck! Brilliant but simple idea."
("Simple idea?" *sniff*)
"Your site was so interesting and informative I had to call a friend to tell her about it. Great work"
(Now, that one I like.)
I'm not willing to follow any of the links they've included.
Fortunately, Akismet continues to do a great job filtering this stuff out for me.
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