As some of you know, I started a solo blog back in March of this year, and posted there pretty much every day until going on hiatus in August. I’ve been getting a bunch of e-mails recently about what my plans are for the solo blog, so I figured I would post something about it here. I’ve decided that I’m going to make the hiatus from the solo blog permanent. In other words, I don’t plan to post there any more, at least for the foreseeable future.
My main goal in starting a solo blog was to try to create a more academic and substantive space. I think I succeeded in this, but in the end the downside slightly outweighed the upside. The biggest problem was that finding something substantive and serious to post about every day took a lot of time, and it made the blog seem more like a job than a fun hobby. I was spending around four hours every day looking for an interesting case or legal story, researching it, and then writing something that seemed reasonably insightful. After posting it, I would have to check in 4 or 5 times that day to approve comments in a reasonably timely fashion, and that often led to editing comments or e-mail exchanges with people who didn’t like my editing decisions. I like to think that the end result was a quality blog, but it often felt like real work and was so time-consuming that it cut too much into my other projects.
Second, I found I had mixed feelings about writing only on ‘serious’ legal topics. The VC is a zoo, but it’s a fun zoo: You get dragged into all sorts of debates here that you never expected to get dragged into, and I usually find that pretty entertaining. In general, I’ve found that I get more of a kick out of blogging on diverse topics than sticking just to serious legal questions.
Finally, the results of a reader survey suggested that the great majority of solo blog readers also read the VC, so I figured for that crowd that it didn’t make much difference whether I was posting here or there.