Larry Solum was live-blogging the Bloggership symposium, and had this response to my paper Blogs and the Legal Academy:
Kerr’s thesis that blogs have an inherent problem which stems from the fact that blog posts are viewed in “Reverse Chronological Order” or RCO. That is an important feature of blogs! Kerr argues that this means that Blogs do not lend themselves to mulling and deep reflection on a problem. And Kerr argues that “mulling” is the way that really important legal scholarship gets done.
And I think Kerr is completely wrong–that he has made a fundamental error. One of the most wonderful things about blogs is that they provide an important mechanism for “mulling:” for engaging in extended discussions about important ideas. If you want to see an example of the way that blogs can facilitate “mulling,” and extended discussion of an idea, take a look at this post by Jack Balkin or this post by Eugene Volokh and also this one.
Or take a look at any one of the dozens of serious scholarship blogs! Another problem with Kerr’s point is that RCO does not dominate blogging in quite they way that he thinks. Blogs are archived and full-text searchable–that means that many people get to blogs from Google. And blogs can build their own interfacts: for example, I build a Table of Contents style interface for the blog that serves as a separate archive for the Legal Theory Lexicon.
(color and links from the original)
Larry’s response seems to be making two points: First, blogs provide an important mechanism for mulling, as evidenced by several examples of mulling found on blogs. Second, there is a lot more to blogs than visiting them and just reading the posts at the top.
I don’t think either point is particularly inconsistent with my argument, though, much less evidence that my argument is “completely wrong” and based on a “fundamental error.” Obviously it is possible to mull in a blog post. Mulling is possible in any medium, ranging from IRC to writing on cereal box tops. And law professors are mullers by nature. But my point is about the interaction between technology and social practice: Some technologies tend to encourage different practices, and (for the reasons I point out in the paper) I don’t think blogging is particularly well-suited to the kind of repeated mulling that tends to further lasting legal scholarship. So the fact that Jack Balkin and Eugene Volokh can write a scholarly blog post in a debate with Lary Solum doesn’t say very much. Such debates tend to be rare.
Similarly, I agree with Larry that it is possible to supplement blogs with links that go beyond RCO. It is also true that many legal blogs are accessed by Google. But I’m not sure what this shows. Maybe I’m just missing the boat, but my sense is that most people visit blogs for the timely links. Links to other materials can be featured, but my sense is that they are not used very often at most blogs. And they are never used by those that view blogs using feeds.
The fact that blogs often get a lot of Google traffic also has uncertain significance. On one hand, it opens up a very different question: Blogs as tools for scholarly research by users, instead of blogs as tools for advancing scholarship among the bloggers themselves. But even so, I’m not sure that legal blogs with lots of Google traffic are being used for scholarship very often. For example, Michael Froomkin’s blog Discourse.net has a Zeitgeist page that lists the search terms used to find his blog. Here is a representative set of recent search terms, with search terms used multiple times in larger font:
blog personality quiz · dancing banana · soviet gulag · jessica gabel · flying people · middle district of florida court records dr betty carter · cell phone tapped · chernobyl photographs · what the administration is trying to do is create a new legal regime · command responsibility · best buy dishwasher installation · france child molestation case · windows xp look alike · mary cheney · past wartime torture · phosphorus burning video stream · vew.plus.sex,net
What this suggests, I think, is that the number of people who visit legal blogs via Google who are conducting legal research is actually relatively small. (Or is there a jurisprudence of dancing bananas that I’m missing?) Of course, this doesn’t stop a blogger from writing long involved posts on legal issues. But it suggests that the interested audience for such posts that will arrive there from search engines is probably pretty small. It’s an empirical question, of course, so maybe I’m just guessing at proportions incorrectly. But my sense is that the numbers are low enough that few bloggers are going to mull at length on an issue with the hope that Googling researchers will come across those posts and find them helpful down the road.
Seems to me that the relevant questions re: google searches, are:
1: How many people, if given the option, would try to find answers to legal questions by searching for legal blogs?
2: How many people who conduct such searches, find what they are looking for, and are satisfied by the results?
The fact that a lot of people wander in and out due to the perplexities of google seems kind of beside the point. If a fair number of legal researchers seek for info this way, and find it, then who cares how many others stop by for two seconds, don’t find any dancing bananas, and take off? Seems irrelevant to the scholarship debate to me. The key question isn’t what proportion of searchers are looking for legal answers, its what proportion of legal searchers find what they are looking for.
[OK Comments: Why is this the key question?]
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It’s an empirical question, of course, so maybe I’m just guessing at proportions incorrectly.
Perhaps you can get the university to pay for the good version of SiteMeter, which tracks search words used to reach your site? I’ll bet you’ll find that many, if not most, of you Google referalls will come from people looking for legal information.
I think people are using blogs for intellectual edification, but that it would be hard to track the percentage of users. Why? Because, by defintion, people reaching a given site will reach that site using terms the correspond with that site. IOW, if a blogger only blogged about scholarly topics, then everyone reaching that site via Google would have been Googling scholarly things. If a blogger bloged about dancing banannas, well, of course people are going to find that site via those search terms listed, above.
In any event, here are some people reached C&F (I picked a few from the first 100 showing up in my SiteMeter log):
clark v arizona
crime and commerce clause
constitutional protections civil vs criminal
sociopathy
wrongful accusation of crime depression among lawyers
citing u.s. constitution amendment legal writing
scalia, gonzales v. raich [I get about 5 unique visits a day for this.]
plea bargaining is unconstitutional federalism and gay marriage
ny law absolute judicial immunity danger creation theory
I could go on and on, because people really are using Google to look for legal informatoin. In fact, “danger creation” is pretty esoteric stuff, but at least 3 or 4 people a day find my site searching for information about it.
Anyhow, I’m not sure why it’s relevant that people are using Google to look for law, but there are people (and lots of them) who are starved for information about legal topics.
Again, I’m not sure why that’s relevant, but I couldn’t let your blog-readers-as-dancing-bannana-fans theseis go unchallenged.
Now, I’m off to find out what the hell a dancing bananna is…. Maybe that’s how I will next reach OrinKerr.com? ;^)
Prof. Kerr:
I’d be very careful before making any kind of analysis about what “most people” are doing when they reach a blog via Google, especially when what you’re looking at is a cloudburst. The trouble is that you’re drawing conclusions based upon noise rather than searching for the signal. For instance, you write:
the number of people who visit legal blogs via Google who are conducting legal research is actually relatively small
No. It implies that the audience for legal research is small only in proportion to the audience for all other topics. This isn’t surprising. For instance, the vast majority of search engine hits on my blog are for “paris hilton,” simply because I once wrote a post about feeling old because I couldn’t find the infamous videotape online. I probably get 0.00000000001% of all searches for Paris Hilton. However, the universe of people searching for the Paris Hilton sex tape is so large that it overwhelms all my other search terms.
This doesn’t mean that the number of people conducting legal research on blogs is itself small. It just means that the number of people conducting legal research is small in comparison to all other people. (And I think we could add, “Thank god for that”: a society more interested in the well-pleaded complaint rule than dancing bananas would be dull indeed.)
Finally, I’d offer a contrary if anecdotal suggestion about mulling. I recently posted a long piece about using tax shelters to protest the Defense of Marriage Act. It’s a crazy idea, but something I’d like to turn into an article. The problem? I don’t actually know enough to firmly outline the kind of tax shelter I’d like to make. Since posting the piece, I’ve gotten three or four very helpful e-mails on areas to research and pointers for how to go forward.
And here, of course, is the biggest ‘mulling’ advantage of blogs over other academic publications: people read them and the number of mullers is much larger.
First link to Prof. Solum is broken, btw. (Needs the “h” in “http”)
Prof.,
I’d answer your question in more detail, but I think Rickey and Mike have done it better than I could. The key point being: if a lot of legal searchers are finding what they are looking for, and such searchers get significant value from searching blogs, who cares how many random people find the blog because google sent them astray, took a three second look, and left?
Ergo, the problem is using the relation between total searches and legal searches as the metric. The proper metric is — what is the absolute number of legal searches, and what proportion of all research is being done via blogs. (I’d also say that even if this number is pretty low, that shouldn’t be a cause for despair…it takes time for blogs to build up insitutional capital, and for them to become a more standard resource.)