Straddling Two Blogospheres
I’ve been writing about technology on this blog for a long time. The first posts here date back to Oct. 2001. and while I don’t claim they are very good, I will claim to have been around the tech blogosphere for a very long time relatively speaking.
Within the last year, however, as I’ve been writing about my work with Litigation Support, I’ve found myself more and more drawn to law blogs, or blawgs as they are commonly called. I’d say that the Lit Support posts here are very much part of the legal blogosphere as opposed to the tech one, but the tech posts are still part of the overall tech blogosphere.
One thing that I can say that I’ve been proud of over the last 6 plus years of blogging; I’ve never been anywhere close to an A-list blogger, and I’ve never gotten involved in any of the petty BS that tends to play itself out in the Tech Blogosphere every few months, at the very least. I won’t point out cases, or names, those of you who’ve been around as long as I have can probably think of 5 examples just off the top of your head. I’ve been perfectly happy to sit over here in my own little corner, sharing information and ideas with other techies, instead of worrying about getting on Digg, or Techmeme, or how much my Google Ads were bring in, etc. (disclosure: I’ve never run ads and never made any money from this site, any money I made in Amazon Affiliate links, which was infinitesimal, was added to my own donations to child abuse support and prevention organizations.) I’ve enjoyed it and learned from it far more than I ever thought I would, that is reward enough in itself.
As I’ve moved over into paying more attention to the legal blogs though, I haven’t seen any of that behavior. Given the reputation of lawyers, I actually would have expected it more, but I haven’t seen much of it at all. For sure, many lawyers are blogging just to get attention, and bring in business, but I think, given the nature of legal work, and the existing ethics rules in place when it comes to offering legal advice, criticism, it keeps things on a somewhat mature level.
Maybe I just haven’t been around the legal blogosphere long enough to have noticed. On the other hand, maybe there’s just something about the human nature that, absent strong ethical rules, causes the lesser of our qualities to come to the forefront every now and again for a good airing? I’m not sure, but I’d be interested in a conversation about it.
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The tech blogs tend to attract the “chest-thumpers”, those who like to boast about being able to do something: dude, my virus reached a level 3 alert on symantec(!). I haven’t visited the blawgs, but I imagine people who are involved with billable hours would be more sensitive to using their free time a little more productively than flaming someone on a computer issue.
Everyone has ethics, it’s just a matter of maturity and consideration of others.
Marc,
When I first saw your comment about chest thumpers this morning, I thought to myself “wait, lawyers are famous for being like that, we should see that more in the legal blogs?”, but after giving it some thought something occurs to me. The chest-thumping lawyer would never stoop to blogging. They’re much too busy with important clients and important things to mess around with something like blogging.
On the other hand, in the tech world, you’re no one if you don’t have a blog, or a site where you can spout off about your latest accomplishments, or rip someone else’s accomplishments. The chest-thumping type of person in the tech world considers blogging to be the important thing, that surely everyone cares about what they have to say. The legal world hasn’t seen blogging in that same light yet. It hasn’t risen to the level of “real lawyer work”, the way it has risen to that level among tech pundits and social media experts. Part of me hopes it never does. 😉