Order C.B.S. Today:
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Born to Fail, But on Life Support
Kevin O’Keefe (Lexblog) and Scott Greenfield (Simple Justice) are having a discussion, prompted by Mark Herrmann’s (Drug and Device Law) observation that the ABA Journal’s list of the top 100 legal blogs contains only two blogs associated with biglaw firms, about whether and why biglaw blogs suck and whether social Darwinism will eventually eliminate those blogs that do suck.
Sometimes we know a law blog is doomed to fail. We know it because its title is keyword-rich, or because the titles of most of its posts are keyword-rich, or because it has calls to action at the bottom of posts (incidentally, I would argue that a call to action at the bottom of a blog post renders that post an advertisement, which in most states must be approved by the State Bar)—all signs that the author is looking for commercial return on his blogging investment. We know it because it refers to its author in the third person, or because the writing is stilted and lacking in passion.
We know it because it is boring.
A blog doesn’t have to be funny, but if it doesn’t either educate or entertain, it’s boring. The best legal blogs do both.
What is failure? It’s not having fewer readers than someone else—a blog may be a success with an audience of one. It’s not making less money than someone else—most blogs have no dream of making a buck. It’s not even getting linked to less than the next blog—while incoming links may be a metric of success, a blog may succeed without ever being cited.
Failure is stopping. Not writing any more. Giving up.
Failure is quitting.
Boring law bloggers will quit because it’s no fun being boring. And some nonboring law bloggers will quit because . . . well, because other things take higher priority.
So we see a boring law blog, and we don’t subscribe to it or blogroll it or link to it. And eventually the blogger will find that he’s talking to himself, shouting his boring commercial thoughts out into a vacuum. And eventually he’ll quit.
That’s how natural selection would work. But natural selection can be stymied, or at least fiddled with. Cases in point: the English Bulldog, Siamese twins, and LexBlog blogs.Many LexBlog blogs don’t suck (Vickie Pynchon, Jamie Spencer); maybe most LexBlog blogs don’t suck—there’s a huge well of writing talent in the legal community. But Kevin is selling blogs to lawyers as a marketing scheme—blog to get business—and some of Kevin’s customers wouldn’t be blogging if they didn’t think they could make a buck, so it’s not hard to find blogs in Kevin’s blogroll that do suck. Kevin says, “Most of our clients tell us their blogging is a lot of fun.” I’m willing to bet that there is a high inverse correlation between fun and suckiness.
Like a good kindergarten teacher, Kevin’s job is to encourage the slow kids and leave the smart kids alone. LexBlog props up its blogs with an in-house blogroll so that even those that suck get links from those blogs that don’t, and whose authors really should know better. So even those bloggers who are not having fun, and whose blogs therefore suck, get a little bit of traffic to keep them going.
I’m going to be the mean kindergarten teacher, and direct my comments to the law bloggers who don’t think blogging is a lot of fun: it’s not a lot of fun because your blog sucks. I’m sure there is something you’re good at, but it’s not blogging. You’re wasting your time. If you don’t enjoy writing it, nobody wants to read it.
Quit now.
6 responses to “Born to Fail, But on Life Support”
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It’s pretty depressing that you’ve cited the only two Arizona law blogs I know as two of your three national examples of blogs bound to fail. I haven’t found another Arizona law blog I want to read regularly, yet we seem to dominate when it comes to search relevance. What the hell is wrong with us?
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Mark Bennett December 7th, 2009 at 09:34
Truth be told, that was only a function of the way I worked my way through Kevin’s list of LexBlog blogs to find my examples. If I had started in the T’s I might have found Tennessee blogs exemplifying those traits.
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Thanks for the Vickie Pynchon’s blog “doesn’t suck.” Truly. It’s an honor to be singled out for unsuckiness (with Jamie Spencer) among the hundreds of blogs in Kevin’s “stable.”
Here’s what I was saying to my husband who I’ve coerced into blogging on blogger to see if he likes it and the blogosphere likes him:
YOU MUST BE A WRITER. Why do writers write as if their lives depended upon communicating in this particular way? I go to the professionals.
Philip Roth: [T]o safeguard what little equilibrium I still possessed, I chose to sit as I have been sitting all my life, in a chair, at a desk, under a lamp, substantiating my peculiar existing in the most consolidating way I know, taming temporarily with a string of words the unruly tyranny of my incoherence. from Operating Shylock.
[T]he process of revising a poem is no arbitrary tinkering, but a continued honing of the self at the deepest level. Jane Hirshfield, Nine Gates – Entering the Mind of Poetry.
The poem, then, is not a transcription of an already known world, but a process of discovery, and the act of writing . . . is one that demands personal risks. [The poet does] not write solely in order to express himself, but to orient himself within his own life and take his stand in the world and it is this feeling of necessity that communicates itself to a reader. [P]oems are more than literary artifacts. They are a means of staying alive. Paul Auster, The Poetry of Exile, from The Art of Hunger.
And the reason to read? To compare my own idiosyncratic, sometimes joyous and sometimes dreadful, subjective experience with that of my fellows – to feel kinship; to be “well met” and as a hedge against isolation and it’s first cousin, insanity.
As Galway Kinnell (poet) wrote: if you write your own experience deeply enough, yours becomes just the voice of another creature on the planet speaking.
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I agree that Vickie’s blog does not suck, in fact I really like it!
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Mark Bennett December 16th, 2009 at 05:36
What’re you talking about? Around here, “doesn’t suck” is high praise!
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