The Harvard Bloggership Conference Continues
posted by Daniel Solove
At the Harvard Bloggership Conference I recently attended, disagreements seemed to be relatively mild (my attempt at a humorous recap is here). For the most part, everybody was in agreement, with some exceptions on the fine points. Even Kate Litvak (the purported anti-blogging perpetual blog commentator) had relatively moderate views about blogging. Despite some small differences of opinion, the conference didn’t rage with the fire of strong disagreement.
However, now in the conference’s post-mortem, some disagreement seems to be flaring up in the blogosphere. There’s a debate raging over whether “mixed” blogs (consisting of law mixed with information about personal hobbies) are a good or bad thing for the legal blogosphere. Dan Filler has comments on the debate here.
For other posts about the issue, see:
For those wanting to read about the conference, 3L Epiphany has collected a comprehensive set of links to posts about the conference. You can read numerous conference recaps, recaps about recaps, and recaps about the recaps of recaps.
I guess that the Harvard Bloggership Conference really hasn’t ended. It rages on in the blogosphere, kind of like aftershocks from an earthquake. But I guess that it is no big surprise that a conference about blogging would generate a lot of blogging . . .
As for my views on this debate, I think that Dan Filler’s post nicely captures what I think about the matter.
May 1, 2006 at 12:48 pm
Posted in: Blogging, Law School
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Responses (1)
Roger Alford - May 1, 2006 at 3:45 pm
You should also include in this list Ann Althouse’s post and podcast on the subject of mixed blogging. She openly argues that her blogging is art, not law.
My general approach is to let a million flowers bloom when it comes to law professor blogging. But that does not mean that every blog by a law professor is a law blog (or an art blog). When I did my Opinio Juris summary of the most popular law blogs, I was faced with the very difficult and controversial issue of defining a law blog. Everyone seems to agree that the wildly popular blogs Instapundit and Hugh Hewitt are not law blogs. Thus, we recognize that there is a line somewhere. But what about other mixed bloggers? Ian Best had similar struggles in his 3L Epiphany taxonomy of law blogs that he discusses here on “taxonomy omissions.” My leaning was and is to argue that any blog that does not have a majority of posts about law is not a law blog. That’s why I excluded Ann Althouse and a few other blogs in my list, but included in the list other mixed bloggers who seem to have a majority of posts that are law related. I would love for there to be a general consensus about what constitutes a law blog, but right now there isn’t. If mixed bloggers who primarily focus on topics other than law resisted the temptation to be called a law blog, the problem would solve itself.
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