Archive for the ‘Blogging’ Category

FTC and Blogger Disclosure Rules

posted by Deven Desai

As I argue in my essay Individual Branding the web presents important and amazing new possibilities for individuals to earn money and much of that potential will flow from one’s online reputation. In short, as one blogs or shares information in another form, one becomes a trusted source and can start extract money from those activities. I argue that those acts have the seeds of the possible destruction of Benkler’s world of sharing. Today the FTC has targeted a practice that arguably could increase the reliability of social network endorsements but will also upset many people.

As CNET reports, “Independent bloggers who fail to disclose paid reviews or freebies can face up to $11,000 in fines from the Federal Trade Commission, according to revisions to the agency’s “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising” published Monday.” The FTC has not updated the Guidelines since 1980. The press release is here. The full text of the Guides are here (pdf). It is 81 pages, and I have not read it as yet but one thing people should know is that the effective date is December 1, 2009.

From the release it appears that the guides take am expansive view of what presents a moment to disclose “The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.” CNET suggests that celebrities and “mommy bloggers” could be in trouble under the new rules. (Here is my prediction on the riposte to come but that I don’t think is accurate: “The FTC hates moms. In a down economy and with more and more people needing new ways to earn, the FTC actions are a direct attack on the importance of moms.” Now back to our regularly scheduled blogging.)

There are a ton of oddly connected things here. First, I just blogged about CITP and its FedThread project. That project would allow one to track this sort of moment rather quickly. Second, I was just at the Works In Progress Intellectual Property Conference at Seton Hall (which was yet again an excellent conference and for which everyone at Seton Hall deserves many thanks) where Zahr Stauffer presented a fascinating paper called Novels for Hire: Branded Entertainment, Copyright and the Law that I think will have something to say about these changes. As one blog notes, the practice of giving journalists freebies is common. Zahr’s paper shows how advertising and novels have had a rather curious interaction over the years. I think the paper will help understand the way writing and advertising have co-existed in either good or bad ways at different times with the shift to blogging fitting in as part of that history. The paper should be available soon so keep an eye out for it.

Electronics and other big ticket items seem to be where the concerns are. I look forward to finding out whether book, film, and music reviewers have to tell readers whether they received a review copy of the book. In general if one only says nice things about a review subject, one might receive more books etc. I think that non-professional blogs and other online information sources such as rating systems and FaceBook will allow people to find out whether they should buy a product (i.e., one might use a personal network to ask whether a product is good). That practice could undercut the quiet payment model.

Here is a possible way to understand this turn of events. 1) Secret endorsements die out and full disclosure of what has been given is the norm. 2) Small bloggers and big agencies are no longer able to seem credible as reviewers. 3) If people want independent reviews, they must pay magazines or other pay sources who can afford to buy the review items and avoid the taint of being given free stuff. 4) The public does not want to pay and instead reads the blog reviews with the disclosures and augments the research with social networks and user ratings which are more difficult to fake and possibly more reliable. 5) Yet again paid, professional independent news and reviews seems to be squeezed out.

  October 5, 2009 at 1:44 pm  Tags: Blogging, FTC, guides  Posted in: Blogging, Consumer Protection Law, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Media Law, Web 2.0   Print This Post   7 Comments

Cyber Civil Rights vs Privacy in the “Skanks in NYC” case

posted by Kaimipono D. Wenger

As Dan rightly notes, the recent court order unmasking the anonymous author of the “Skanks in NYC” blog raises serious privacy concerns. He elaborates on those concerns in his post, arguing that the court used too low of a standard, that the lawsuit may have been frivolous, and that anonymity needs greater protection. Dan links to CyberSLAPP, an EFF project which combats abusive lawsuits that seek to unmask anonymous critics of corporations or public figures.

CyberSLAPP’s site contains a spirited defense of a right of anonymous criticism which reads, in part:

Why is anonymous speech important?

There are a wide variety of reasons why people choose to speak anonymously. Many use anonymity to make criticisms that are difficult to state openly to their boss, for example, or the principal of their children’s school. The Internet has become a place where persons who might otherwise be stigmatized or embarrassed can gather and share information and support victims of violence, cancer patients, AIDS sufferers, child abuse and spousal abuse survivors, for example. They use newsgroups, Web sites, chat rooms, message boards, and other services to share sensitive and personal information anonymously without fear of embarassment or harm. Some police departments run phone services that allow anonymous reporting of crimes; it is only a matter of time before such services are available on the Internet. Anonymity also allows “whistleblowers” reporting on government or company abuses to bring important safety issues to light without fear of stigma or retaliation. And human rights workers and citizens of repressive regimes around the world who want to share information or just tell their stories frequently depend on staying anonymous sometimes for their very lives.

Is anonymous speech a right?

Yes. Anonymous speech is presumptively protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Anonymous pamphleteering played an important role for the Founding Fathers, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, whose Federalist Papers were first published anonymously. And the Supreme Court has consistently backed up that tradition, ruling, for example, that an Ohio law requiring authors to put their names on campaign literature was a violation of the First Amendment. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that protecting anonymous speech has the same purpose as the First Amendment itself: to “protect unpopular individuals from retaliation and their ideas from suppression.”

Of course, any sensible person would be opposed to silencing today’s James Madisons or Alexander Hamiltons. Is this really the correct analogy here, though? Is Skanks in NYC like the Federalist Papers? Read the rest of this post »

  August 25, 2009 at 11:40 am  Tags: Cyber Civil Rights, Privacy  Posted in: Blogging, Google & Search Engines, Privacy   Print This Post   3 Comments

Feminist Law Professors

posted by Elizabeth Nowicki

I have long been a fan of the blog “Feministlawprofessors.com.” The blog does a stellar job of raising and discussing various issues, the content of the blog is sound and reasoned, and Ann Bartow, the founder of the website, has graciously cross-posted some of my posts on prostitution over the past couple years.

Therefore, when Bridget Crawford, another of the main posters on feministlawprofessors.com, asked if I wanted to be named on their list of “self-identified feminist law professors,” I was thrilled to be asked. The question was raised, however: What does the label “feminist law professor” mean? If I was going to self-identify as a “feminist law professor,” I wanted to be sure I fit within the definition.

The reality is that those who know me well might not immediately fit me within the category of “feminist law professor,” if we consider only the older stereotypes about what a feminist “looks like.” To wit, I have never taught “feminist legal theory” (though I could and would, happily), I am Catholic, I am fairly conservative, I have never been a member of NOW, I have been a member of the Federalist Society, I am not offended by some things that are clearly “gendered” (such as men opening doors for women), and I have never burned a bra.

That said, I support equality for all, and I engage in activities intended to support this goal. Indeed, one of the many things that troubles me about the legal profession is the fact that women make up roughly 50% of all law students but only about 19% of all law firm partners and less than 20% of all Supreme Court justices.

But does supporting equality for all make me a feminist law professor? If so, wouldn’t – in theory – most law professors be “feminist law professors?”

I realize that this blog post should be many paragraphs longer, to address the issues raised by my questions above. But even with a blog post five times the length of this one, I doubt I could do the questions justice. So I will end simply by observing that, while I am happy to be labeled a “feminist law professor,” it is interesting to me that the phrase is not easily defined.

  July 13, 2009 at 7:07 am   Posted in: Blogging, Feminism and Gender   Print This Post   3 Comments

Thank You and Blogging Rate

posted by Elizabeth Nowicki

Many thanks to Dan and all the folks here at Concurring Opinions for again inviting me to guest blog. I cut my teeth guest blogging here and at TruthontheMarket.com (where I am still a regular guest blogger) three years ago, and it is nice to be asked back. Thank you.

My hope is to blog about at least the following topics while I am here:
1. Prostitution
2. Other People Who Have My Exact Name (Elizabeth A. Nowicki)
3. Corporate Governance, Shareholder Activism, and Boards of Directors
4. Delaware Jurists
5. New Orleans
6. Women in Legal Education

Note, however, that you should not expect me to blog with the speed and volume of someone like Blog Emperor Paul Caron, because my long-harbored reservations about the potential impact of blogging make me a bit of a slow poster. Since my first blogging days, I have worried about whether I could accurately convey in a blog post things like tenor, nuance, and jest, and my concern about this and other blogging issues (such as typos, grammar mistakes, being impolitic, failing to link to others, etc.) tends to slow me down. Given that the readership of this blog is huge, I am cautious about posting something that I have not vetted, edited, and re-written.

Similarly, I remember when another academic blogger posted on his blog about not securing a particular consulting project due to a position he had articulated on his blog. I do a bit of consulting, expert witness, and media work, so I try to be mindful about not committing on a blog to positions I might want to reconsider if I were asked to be an expert witness or to comment for the media. The notion that I might articulate a view on this blog that I might want to disavow 15 years from now makes me squeamish.

Moreover, as a general matter, I try to avoid even the potential for offending large constituencies in the legal or academic communities with something I have posted on a legal blog. For example, for several days, I have stewed over what, if anything, to post about the former Villanova Law School Dean and the prostitution situation. I caught the “news” about the prostitution situation right when it broke, so I could have beaten Caron for the title of “First Mainstream Legal Academic Blogger To Post On The Topic.” But my worry about posting something that might offend my friends at Villanova or members of the AALS Section on Women in Legal Education, of which I am currently the Chair, or colleagues in my religious community kept me standing down, gnashing my teeth, while Caron blogged the news. To be sure, I have blogged before about prostitution, multiple times, so it would be natural for me to chime in, but the notion that I could, with a single post, offend a huge range of people gives me pause. The internet should be used with care.

That said, the fastest post I ever drafted and posted was my post on the Supreme Court’s opinion in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta. I read the Supreme Court’s opinion and drafted my post in the two-hour window I had between classes on the day the opinion was issued, and I did not have time to re-read my post and labor over editing because I had to rush off to teach my second class. Yet the post has been one of my most well-received posts, and people seem to think it is at least decent. So I suppose I need to revisit whether my reservations about blogging, which prevent me from becoming a prolific poster, are actually based in fact. (Then again, the fact that Heidi Hurd’s sarcastic e-mails have led to likely unappreciated press solidifies my belief that releasing words across the internet is dangerous business indeed.)

Regardless, I look forward to posting here.

  July 7, 2009 at 2:05 pm   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   One Comment

Profile of SCOTUS Blog’s Tom Goldstein

posted by Daniel Solove

Today’s Washington Post has an interesting profile of SCOTUSBlog’s Tom Goldstein, a partner at Akin Gump and founder of SCOTUSBlog. From the article:

What makes the brash and balding 38-year-old such a hot media property is Scotusblog.com, the Web site he founded six years ago to obsessively track the high court. At 7:34 a.m. last Tuesday, an hour before news of the nomination leaked, he posted an essay on the likely lines of attack if President Obama picked Sotomayor. Had he guessed wrong, Goldstein says, he would have looked like “the world’s biggest idiot. I was out there on a limb.”

Three years ago, Goldstein joined the blue-chip Washington firm of Akin Gump, which also agreed to take on Scotusblog and is listed as the site’s host. Despite the unorthodox arrangement, Goldstein says his staff, which includes veteran Supreme Court reporter Lyle Denniston, has complete independence. “Lyle could write that our clients are completely insane and evil and there’d be nothing to stop him,” Goldstein says in his 12th-floor office with a sweeping view of the Washington Monument. . . .

A graduate of American University’s law school, Goldstein founded a small firm — soon joined by his wife — in the third bedroom of their Northwest Washington home. He pursued his goal, to become a Supreme Court practitioner, by cold-calling lawyers in cases that might be headed for high court review. Goldstein was denigrated by more credentialed members of the bar as an overeager ambulance chaser, but the strategy worked: He has argued 21 cases before the Supreme Court. (Goldstein still finances his old firm, which includes his wife and remains at his home, now in Chevy Chase, a few doors down from Chief Justice John Roberts. The firm is an Akin Gump subcontractor.)

White House officials had asked to consult Goldstein on the court vacancy, but by the time he returned from a weekend in Paris, Obama had made his choice. Determined not to miss the action, Goldstein canceled a meeting in Los Angeles with a top producer about a reality series based on his life, the rights to which were bought by Sony Pictures Television. (”They must be smoking crack,” Goldstein says.) A poker fanatic who plays with pots as large as $100,000, he also delayed plans to compete in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

For more, read the article.

  June 1, 2009 at 8:32 am   Posted in: Blogging, Constitutional Law, Supreme Court   Print This Post   No Comments

On Being an Ambassador for Pittsburgh

posted by Michael Madison

By popular request, I’m posting this link to my brief appearance in this morning’s New York Times.  (Well, the link is popular in certain quarters, and I did receive a request to post it!)   The story has to do with tomorrow’s mayoral primary, in which Pittsburgh’s young mayor, Luke Ravenstahl, front man for an emerging Democratic Party machine that someday may do the elder Daley proud, is certain to defeat his two challengers, Patrick Dowd, current darling of local progressives, and Carmen Robinson, a well-liked but under-funded African American lawyer and former police officer.

For most purposes, neither the story nor the interview that preceded it have anything to do with my academic life, though the Times gives me credit for being a professor at Pitt Law.  Instead, the Times piece, like a recent interview that I gave Dutch TV (watch for it!) and a piece earlier this Spring for CNN (teased here, then preempted by the tragic death of a certain skiing actress and replaced by this blog post) are the products of what one Burghosphere colleague (Burghosphere is the extravagant name that we Pittsburgh bloggers have given ourselves) calls my status as an “ambassador” for the city.  My five-year-old blog about the many futures of Pittsburgh, Pittsblog, was one of the first local blogs, and while it now has plenty of company, it is still one of the dozen or so that try to bring a little light to the heat generated by Steelers and Penguins fandom.  Media search for light-generating media; they find me; I become a momentary local celebrity because I’m in the paper of record.  Rinse and repeat.

Still, underneath the hood, there is a connection to my research interests, whether or not you care about the Steel City itself. 

Read the rest of this post »

  May 18, 2009 at 10:06 am   Posted in: Blogging, Culture   Print This Post   No Comments

Alexander Meiklejohn, Blog Comment Policies, and Free Speech

posted by Neil Richards

I read with interest a couple of weeks ago the discussion on this and other law professor blogs about comments policies – whether to allow comments, whether to moderate them, and when and whether to edit and/or delete them.  The discussion reminded me of Alexander Meiklejohn’s famous conception of free speech as a moderated town meeting, where the diversity and quality of discussion was more important than any individual right to speak.  Meiklejohn argued that “the First Amendment … is not the guardian of unregulated talkativeness” and that the free speech guarantee was “not that everyone shall speak, but that everything worth saying shall be said.”

I think something similar applies to the moderation of blog comments – moderation in the pursuit of good discussion is a healthy thing.   Of course, there is always the danger that thin-skinned or intellectually dishonest moderators might edit in order to come out better in an argument, but this risk is lessened by the fact that there are lots of blogs, and (at least in the case of law blogs) there is a fairly robust set of professional norms and reputational consequences operating in the background.  So I think blog comment policies (like the one on this blog) are perfectly fine (even though I there us some irony in that the blog comment policy having comments turned off!).  But like Meiklejohn’s moderator, as long as the discussion is being moderated constructively, there are real gains from numerous moderated discussions.  In fact, since different discussions can operate under different conditions of moderation, some discussions can be tightly moderated (ie, books and newspapers), others can have little or no moderation, and at the opposite extreme there is the wiki model, where even the statements of others are subject to revision and alteration.  A wide variety of discussions and forms of discussion is, I think, the key to a robust and healthy discourse.

One natural objection to this line of argument is that we’re not really talking about the First Amendment here, since all of the blogs and fora of discussion are private actors.  I’ve increasingly come to believe that the values of free discussion and debate are too important to be left to the First Amendment.  (I make a mild form of this argument here in a recent article).  Newspapers, blogs, email, water-cooler chats and other forms of relatively public and relatively private discussion are the building blocks of a vibrant expressive culture, and if we only think about free expression from the perspective of avoiding government anti-censorship, we are missing (at least) half of the world.  For this reason, I think discussions about issues like blog comment policies are centrally the concern of free expression, and such discussions can benefit immensely from a little First Amendment theory.

Blog comments are turned off from this post (just kidding!)

  May 7, 2009 at 9:22 am   Posted in: Blogging, Constitutional Law, Cyber Civil Rights, First Amendment   Print This Post   3 Comments

Exploring Commons Institutions

posted by Michael Madison

Thanks to Deven for the generous introduction and to Dan and the Co-Op team for inviting me to spend some time here this month.  The introduction intentionally saves space by not including a couple of things that I’ll talk about during my stay:  My other blogs, and my appointment as Research Dean at Pitt.  Both have something to do with my current work on commons institutions.  Over the course of this guest stint I hope to explain some of the connections and to generate suggestions and feedback that might help me see others.

 

Read the rest of this post »

  May 6, 2009 at 8:08 am   Posted in: Blogging, Intellectual Property, Law School (Scholarship), Property Law, Sociology of Law, Technology   Print This Post   One Comment

Are There Special TARP Appropriations for Silencing Bloggers?

posted by Frank Pasquale

The Paulson-Geithner-Summers regime has been remarkably adept at stonewalling people like Elizabeth Warren and otherwise avoiding transparency in the bailout. Now one of its main beneficiaries, Goldman Sachs, appears to be targeting mere commentators. They’ve hired a prestigious law firm to menace a writer who collects facts & commentary about the company at this site. As the Daily Telegraph reports,

Florida-based [Mike] Morgan began a blog entitled “Facts about Goldman Sachs” – the web address for which is goldmansachs666.com – just a few weeks ago. . . . [M]any of the posts relate to other Wall Street firms and issues. According to Chadbourne & Parke’s letter, dated April 8, [Goldman] is rattled because the site “violates several of Goldman Sachs’ intellectual property rights” and also “implies a relationship” with the bank itself.

How could anyone think Goldman itself would be affiliating with or authorizing a site that links it to devilry? Unfortunately, the strange range of results of UDRP decisions on similarly satiric sites mean that this is not an absurd legal argument. And given the apocalyptic consequences of the former investment bank’s “financial engineering,” perhaps a reasonable person would associate it with the “mark of the beast”–or guess that hellfire was just one more profitmaking angle for its partners.

Activity like this helps us understand why the wall of silence about the exact nature of and conditions (or lack thereof) on TARP/TALF funding are so important to Treasury. Imagine if we were able to track exactly how much more executives were being paid because of these funds than if they’d have been paid absent taxpayers’ subventions. What if we could track who was benefiting politically from donations by employees at the propped up firms? What if the firms in general start using their corporate welfare to silence more critics like Mr. Morgan? At what point does this become state action? And might we start asking whether the resistance to nationalization among policy elites might be due to a need to avoid state responsibility for what is essentially state-funded action by maintaining a fig leaf of “private ownership” over the banking system?

Read the rest of this post »

  May 2, 2009 at 12:02 pm   Posted in: Blogging, First Amendment   Print This Post   One Comment

The History of the Conservative Legal Movement

posted by Nate Oman

Crooked Timber is going to be hosting an online symposium on Steve Teles book The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement. They have what looks to be a good line up and first out of the gate is Jack Balkin. Check it out.

  April 27, 2009 at 11:24 am   Posted in: Blogging, Book Reviews, Constitutional Law, Jurisprudence   Print This Post   No Comments

Free Speech at a Cocktail Party

posted by Nate Oman

Yesterday, Dan posted a commenting policy for Concurring Opinions. Such things frequently bring forth muttered imprecations of speech control and the demise of the First Amendment. Of course the mutterers understand that Concurring Opinions, despite its obvious power and influence, is not a state actor, but still it seems like a public space. Shouldn’t we encourage the marketplace of ideas to let a thousand flowers bloom (to paraphrase Holmes and Mao)? Well no, not really.

Read the rest of this post »

  April 21, 2009 at 3:05 pm   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   6 Comments

Blogging for a Living

posted by Daniel Solove

The Wall St. Journal cites a rather questionable statistic about the number of bloggers who blog for a living:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work, and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income. That’s almost 2 million Americans getting paid by the word, the post, or the click — whether on their site or someone else’s. And that’s nearly half a million of whom it can be said, as Bob Dylan did of Hurricane Carter: “It’s my work he’d say, I do it for pay.”

Is the WSJ serious? Perhaps, the 452,000 people who blog as their primary source of income include any college or high school student who has a blog with Google Ads. Otherwise, the statistic seems quite dubious to me. According to a quote from the website where the WSJ cites as the source of the above statistic:

The average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000. However, this is skewed by the top 1% of bloggers who earn $200k+. Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

At Concurring Opinions, we get 100,000+ unique visitors per month, and sadly, our take home pay is far far south of $22,000. Where’s all the money? If it’s out there, it sure ain’t in our pockets, I’ll boldly state that we’re all keeping our day jobs!

  April 21, 2009 at 11:28 am   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   One Comment

Back to Basics

posted by Frank Pasquale

I’ve been a neglectful blogger, so I thought I might sign up for Robert Lanham’s “Internet Era Writing Course.” Despite my absence from Twitter, I’ve completed an embarrassing number of the prerequisites:

ENG: 232WR—Advanced Tweeting: The Elements of Droll

LIT: 223—Early-21st-Century Literature: 140 Characters or Less

ENG: 102—Staring Blankly at Handheld Devices While Others Are Talking

ENG: 301—Advanced Blog and Book Skimming

ENG: 231WR—Facebook Wall Alliteration and Assonance

LIT: 202—The Literary Merits of Lolcats

LIT: 209—Internet-Age Surrealistic Narcissism and Self-Absorption

On a slightly more serious note, check out the legal issues raised by D.T. Max’s moving profile of David Foster Wallace in the New Yorker.

Read the rest of this post »

  April 20, 2009 at 11:01 pm   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   No Comments

Constitutional Problems Under Nationalization

posted by Gerard Magliocca

I want to thank Dan for inviting me to join the blog this month. My friends and family also thank him for relieving them of the exclusive burden of hearing my crazy ideas.

One of the major issues confronting the Obama Administration is how to fix the financial system and other industries that are reeling from the Panic of 2008. In several instances, firms that were deemed “too-big-to-fail” were nationalized to prevent a disorderly bankruptcy (Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG) and in other cases the specter of nationalization looms (Citigroup, Bank of America, and General Motors). While I certainly hope that these takeovers will be few and brief, there is a real prospect that this will not be the case. And this presents a constitutional problem.

Put simply, there is almost no precedent for direct governmental ownership of private firms. The Populist Party of the 1890s, which is the subject of my next book, campaigned on a platform of nationalization, but that effort failed (or was just way ahead of its time). The Tennessee Valley Authority raised some questions about active state participation in the marketplace, but they were never really resolved. As a result, lawyers may be forced to think about some difficult issues over the next few years without much guidance. Here are some examples:

Read the rest of this post »

  April 1, 2009 at 8:42 am   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   3 Comments

Thanks, and Goodbye

posted by Darian Ibrahim

Thanks to my hosts for a fun month of blogging here at Co-Op. I had planned to blog on some additional topics, but there’s nothing like a deadline (for me: to answer this Call for Papers) to focus the attention on writing. I really enjoyed the time here and especially thank the commentators on my posts for the helpful back and forth!

  March 29, 2009 at 12:11 pm   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   2 Comments

New Berkeley Law VC Blog

posted by Darian Ibrahim

Readers interested in venture capital will want to check out the new VC Blog out of Berkeley Law. It’s modeled after the Harvard Corporate Governance Blog, with the focus on scholarly papers. As Larry Solum would say, highly recommended!

  March 3, 2009 at 11:38 am   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   No Comments

Niche Blogging

posted by Corey Yung

I want to thank Dan and the rest of the Concurring Opinions bloggers for having me. I figured I would start by posting about something close to home for me.

Doug Berman, at Sentencing Law & Policy, recently called for more people in the criminal justice world to take up blogging. Specifically, he explained that issue-focused, niche blogs serve the valuable function of expanding the debate about important topics. I have been a blogger for over two years in a very tiny niche: sex crimes. There are definitely positives and negatives to being a single-topic blogger.

For me, the negatives have not been too pronounced, but they do come up from time to time. A niche blog audience tends to be narrower and there are less regular readers. Instead, narrow-focus blogs are consulted more often when a hot topic intersects with the blog’s subject matter. Rick Hasen’s Election Law Blog is a good example of that trend as his traffic patterns substantially change during election season. That means that the niche blogger has to a lot more work during the off-peak times to draw attention to the blog. I am not one who revels in promoting my blog so that has been the toughest thing for me. The other significant negative is there are times when I see a post around the web unrelated to sex crimes to which I really want to respond, but I cannot justify it on my blog.

The positives have, so far, outweighed the negatives for me. Most importantly, the people who read my blog, regularly or irregularly, tend have much higher interest levels about the topics on which I blog. I would guess, for that reason, I get a much higher volume of email from blog readers than I would on a general topic blog. That has allowed me to get to know a lot of people with different perspectives about sex crime laws. Since that has been the primary focus of my scholarship, the reader feedback has served me well in enhancing my scholarly work. I also think there is tremendous value in the disciplinary nature of niche blogging. My blog forces me to read and think about the issues which interest me on a daily basis. While I think there are times when every blogger wonders if blogging is trading off with more productive activity, I think the net effect for me has been to increase my overall work rate.

So, I would extend Berman’s call for more single-issue bloggers beyond the criminal justice area. While I enjoy a lot of group and general interest blogs, there is an important place in the legal blogosphere for niche blogs.

Cross-posted at Sex Crimes.

  March 2, 2009 at 2:15 pm   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   One Comment

Visiting Yale, Balkinization, and Law & Tech Theory

posted by Frank Pasquale

I just wanted to make a note that I’ll be posting less frequently than normal this month, for a few reasons. First, as many of our law prof readers know, the dreaded “March publishing cycle” is upon us. Second, I’m visiting at Yale this term, and it’s always a bit hard to “find your feet” at a new place. Finally, I’m posting at Balkinization and Law & Technology Theory this month.

I hope that SourceHub will add these posts to its apparent aggregation of my blogging at their site. (According to their metrics, I am a “highly opinionated, somewhat negative” writer–leading me to renewed skepticism of number-crunching!)

For those interested, my Balkinization posts have mainly followed up on these reflections on Google; I talk about the book settlement here, and conservative complaints that Google favors Obama here. The theme of Law & Tech Theory this year is technology and human autonomy; I’m concerned with performance-enhancing drugs, revising and updating some posts that first appeared here on Concurring Opinions.

  February 10, 2009 at 10:00 am   Posted in: Administrative Announcements, Blogging   Print This Post   2 Comments

Why Blog II: The Comments

posted by Frank Pasquale

I began drafting this series a few weeks ago, before the current controversy over blog comments brewed. I agree with much of what both Jack Balkin and Dan Solove have said on the matter, and it may be an exhausted topic at this point. But I thought I’d just add a few additional thoughts.

Sometimes a blog audience wants to keep a blog clear of comments. For instance, Andrew Sullivan has surveyed his readers on whether they want comments on his very popular blog, and all the votes I’ve seen have been negative. One of his readers writes:

Readers of your blog could opt to not read the comments section, but in truth we would rarely opt not to read them — on your blog or any other blog. Blog comments have the power to hammerlock one’s attention. I think, humans being highway rubberneckers, we’d be impotent to resist looking over the rantings and counter-rantings that would make their way into your Comments Section. Not only would comments be an incredible drain on one’s time . . . but it also exposes readers to the nasty underbelly of blogging.

While most of the current discussion focuses on what can go wrong with comments, there is much that can go right. The comment section allows readers to “glom on” and add a lot to the conversation. I am indebted to many terrific commenters who consistently alert me to interesting sources of information, flaws in my arguments, or material that supports the original post. Even just hearing someone say “great post!” can be really encouraging. Hence my Blackstone ratio of blog commenting: one positive or helpful comment is worth ten negative ones.

But what to do about negative, irrelevant, kvetching, or cavilling comments? I have a few approaches, depending on the identity of the commenter and the nature of the comments.

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  January 31, 2009 at 8:43 pm   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   13 Comments

The Death of Blog Comments?

posted by Daniel Solove

Over at Above the Law, a new comment policy has been implemented:

As the Above the Law community continues to grow, more people are posting absurd, inane, and arguably offensive comments. And more people are complaining about those comments — in the comments, as well by email and other means. . . .

[W]e’ll be changing our site design so that comments will default to “hidden.” If you want to see the comments, you must affirmatively opt-in, by clicking a button to reveal them (either the “show them anyway” button within the post, or the “comments” button / counter on the front page).

I think that this is a wise step, as many of the comments at Above the Law are quite crude, and they seem to have been getting worse over time.

At Balkinization, a more radical change has been implemented — comments have been turned off for many posts. Jack Balkin writes:

Since last week I have implemented a new policy on the blog. The default rule is that comments are turned off. Each author will decide individually whether to turn the comments on for his or her postings. . . .

[T]he comments sections are populated by regular trolls and many threads have turned into little more than name-calling. There is very rarely any serious analysis; mostly there is point scoring and vitriol. Many regular readers have written to say that they find the comments section a distraction and think the blog would be far better without it.

I’ve always believed that the comment sections of blog posts shouldn’t be wild west free speech zones. Ideally, the comments provide an interesting and thoughtful discussion, even where commenters strongly disagree with a post. Comments that are rude, off-topic, uncivil, and unnecessarily snarky or nasty don’t have much value in my opinion. It appears as though more and more bloggers are starting to get fed up with obnoxious comments. A few years ago, it seemed to me that the blogosphere had a much more permissive view toward comments than it does now.

Fortunately, the commenters here at Concurring Opinions are generally quite thoughtful and civil. I, for one, really hope this continues. I greatly enjoy many of the comments here, and I hope we don’t ever have to resort to limiting or hiding comments. It seems to me that different blog commenting cultures arise on different blogs. I bet that the readership for Balkinization and Concurring Opinions overlaps quite a bit, yet I have noticed that the comments at Balkinization are much as Jack describes them. Why have commenting cultures developed so differently at different blogs? I don’t really know the answer, and it would be interesting to figure out why commenting cultures develop in the ways that they do.

  January 29, 2009 at 1:31 am   Posted in: Blogging   Print This Post   7 Comments

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