On Blogging

I'm pleased to be hanging out in the Faculty Lounge for a bit. I hope to be able to discuss some topics that don't fit in my regular (new) blogging home, Written Description. For my first post, I want to discuss blogging. I'll just discuss some of my own experiences, which may be interesting or useful to others deciding whether to spend time doing it.

I began blogging in late 2008, when Dan Markel invited me to guest for the first time at PrawfsBlawg. I had only been a tenure-track faculty member for a little over a year at the time, so I ignored whatever "don't blog pre-tenure" advice there might be out there. I soon became a regular guest contributor and also joined the group as a permablogger at Madisonian. I thought of blogging as having two primary purposes: 1) writing about things that I don't normally write about, and 2) writing about things that I normally write about. I suppose that covers the waterfront.

Starting with the latter, I often used my blogging to evangelize or to get comments on in-process papers. One particularly brutal set of comments on a paper led to a substantial rewrite and improvement of a paper on the fringe of my expertise (or, I suppose the commenters would say well outside my expertise!). But I also shared my long papers with the masses, with bite-sized chunks presented at a time. I received few comments on these, but am hopeful that people without the time to read the whole paper understood my key points.

Once or twice, I posted naked "here are links to a couple papers" posts. This practice is much debated at PrawfsBlawg, and my post (which I took down) received a snarky comment about self-promotion. But before I took it down, Dan Markel backed me. Guest bloggers at Prawfs are sharing their memories of Dan this year. Since I am not guesting there (more on that later), I'll used this platform to share a happy memory that I keep with me and try to pay forward: getting attacked and knowing Dan had my back.

As to the former category, I enjoyed writing about topics that I am interested in, have an opinion in, but don't have the time to fully research. In other words, I could present half-baked ideas, discuss recent cases, or float new ideas. One set of posts about a Supreme Court case wound up so fully developed that they formed the basis for a later supreme court review article. Thus, there can be value in taking the time to blog about new things.

I figured that post-tenure I would have even more time to write, but it turned out the opposite was true. I wound up taking on some articles that were out of my usual range and required a lot of background reading. I was also working on finalizing a five year empirical data gathering project and verifying/cleaning the data took immense amounts of time. As a result, I haven't guest blogged at PrawfsBlawg since 2013, and I rarely blogged at my home site, Madisonian.

That's how it goes, I suppose, except that at the beginning of this year, Madisonian retooled to become an individual blog of its namesake, Mike Madison, again. This made good sense for him and for his co-bloggers, none of which were active. But I found myself blogless for the first time in several years, and it bothered me. If I had a random thought about a new case or paper, where would I post it? (I'll discuss Facebook and Twitter in a later post.) How would I maintain relevance in the world of current events?

I know it sounds a bit narcissicistic. I don't have any illusions about how many (few) readers I have, and my posts usually generate very few comments. But I've always been buoyed by the occasional reader who says they enjoy my blog posts when I had no idea I was on the radar. And a few of my posts have generated attention in important current debates. So, the thought of not having an outlet was difficult for me. Maybe it shouldn't have been, but the fact that it was told me that I have blogged too little in the last year.

Luckily, Lisa Larrimore Ouellette, who runs Written Description, heard about my bloglessness and invited me to join her blog. I'm grateful to have nice new digs, and also motivated again. The focus of that blog is new scholarship and law in IP, so it's not like I'll ever run out of ideas to talk about.

But I also thought it was time to accept an old invitation here at the Faculty Lounge, to maybe blog about stuff I know a little bit about but don't write about -- like blogging.

Comments

[John Wright]

This is a great post, and I'm excited we have the chance to talk about it. For me, the biggest problem with blogging is usually the bloggers, especially the narcissism--as you allude to above. I think two things in particular would make blogging for more palatable to a lot of people:

1. Stop linking to other blog posts of the blogger. This is terribly annoying. For example "As I've argued elsewhere (link) and per a debate that I had with X (link, link), I recently argued in the Los Angeles times (link) that [whatever]". Nobody's clicking on that crap. And there's just no meaningful information here; it's all self-promotion.

2. Similarly, all the first person. In above, for example, the first person appears a mind-blowing two dozen times. Seriously the whole post is about the poster, instead of some more perspective-neutral theme (e.g., blogging). Instead of such stuff as "I'm pleased to be hanging out... I hope, etc.", the whole post could be simply reframed in terms of "let's talk about blogging.... what are good practices? bad practices? why? [etc.]". The whole personal indulgence can be easily whitewashed and presented neutrally.

3. I know I said two, but here's a third: length. And I think the length really travels with the narcissism insofar as some bloggers think most readers will wade through 1000 word post. No, readers won't. People didn't read above in much detail, they read the first paragraph, then started skimming when they saw the whole length. Probably didn't even finish.

So I just wish bloggers would think through what they're putting out, focusing more on content and readership than themselves. Again, thank you for opening this thread for some--hopefully lively and critical!--discussion.

[brandy karl]

So glad to see this post (and read every word). It's fantastic to see a concrete personal example refuting the oft-touted common wisdom of never presenting anything but polished final papers in public (before tenure). If we can't enage in academic discourse as part of the academy, I'm not sure of the point.

[Former Editor]

I think I disagree with every single thing John Wright just posted, except the welcome and the thanks for starting a discussion on an interesting topic. While I don't have strong opinions on (2), I fully disagree with (1) and (3).

Regarding (1), links are good, even if they are to the bloggers own earlier work. If a reader doesn't like them, they are free to ignore them and a little blue text really isn't all the obtrusive. I, however, have followed many a link in one blog post to an interesting discussion that occurred far enough back in time that I would probably never have seen it otherwise.

Regarding (3), long is only bad if the length is the result of fluff, padding, or poor editing/organization on the part of the blogger. In that way, a long blog post is like any other piece of writing; it's only too long if the author has nothing to say or is saying something poorly. That said, I do not think bloggers should aim for brevity when they believe topic merits a detailed discussion. I'll happily skim down a dozen obviously meandering posts for the occasional lengthy goldmine.

[Michael Risch]

Brandy - Thanks - though I have to admit that I thought some of the unpolished posts were polished...

John - Thanks (I think?) for commenting. I hadn't intended this post to be a best practices post, but your comment makes me think such a post would be a good idea - maybe in the next post. That said, to respond to your comments:

1. Unclear what bothers you - a link AFTER the text, the highlighted text, or the self promotion? A link after the text would be annoying, but I'm with Former Editor that a highlighted text is easily skipped and self promotion is what it is.

2. My intro said: "I'll just discuss some of my own experiences, which may be interesting or useful to others deciding whether to spend time doing it." Based on this, it should have been pretty clear that it was going to be about my story and about whether to blog at all (as opposed to best practices), and that me, my, and I would appear quite a bit. If that's your pet peeve and you don't like it when bloggers blog about their own experiences, you probably shouldn't have kept reading -- it's not like I made a secret about what I was doing. I posted another blog entry today (I'd include a link, but that would violate your first comment) in which there were a few "I's" to describe my thoughts on a paper but it was mostly about other work. I'll include this issue in the next post, because there were more "I's" than I remembered typing in that other post. (Sorry, to rephrase: the next post will include this issue...)

3. This post is 800 words, which is my usual target. If you thought it was over 1000 and way too long (unclear from your comment), it probably means you just thought it was boring and contained little interesting information. That's OK, but call it for what it is.

[Bruce Boyden]

You could probably say about blog posts about what ad agencies say about ads -- if it doesn't make sense to you (too long, too detailed, too many links), you're not in the target demographic.