Over at PrawfsBlawg, Matt Bodie is considering the future of law blogging:
We still seem to be in the early stages of the blogosphere. But I’m wondering, particularly with respect to law blogs, what the future holds. Here are a few possibilities as to directions we’ll take in the future.
1. We’re in the “Far and Away” land rush phase, and pretty soon the continent will be filled up.
2. We’re in the early Internet Boom phase, and a big shakeup is coming down the pike.
3. Blogging is a transitional technology that will lead to new forms of connectivity and creativity. Current bloggers will lead the way to these new formats.
It’s hard to predict these things, of course, but I would suggest a fourth future: A continued increase in the overall amount of law blogging until we reach a natural equilibirum, and then a roughly constant amount of blogging with frequent turnover among active law bloggers. Here’s my thinking. Right now law blogs are pretty new, and the number of law bloggers is increasing. But it’s much easier to start a blog than to keep it up. A typical post might take an hour or so to research, write, and edit. And the better and more thoughtful the post, the more time it takes. Only so many people are willing to put in those hours on a regular basis, and members of that twisted elite group presumably will change over time, too.
Among law professor blogs, the big variable would seem to be whether blogs eventually will be taken more seriously in the scholarly community than they are now. Right now most lawprof bloggers do it for fun, but don’t consider blogging “real work.” If this changes, I think it will transform the nature of law blogs considerably. Whether that would be a good thing or a bad thing is an open question.
Comments are closed.