Reading Time: 4 minutes
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The cratering of X seemed to foreshadow a resurgence of blogging. New platforms sprang up, walled gardens expanded, there was some fracturing but, all in all, not a lot of obvious growth. As someone who blogs but more importantly follows other people’s blogs, it wasn’t quite the outcome I had hoped for.
Platform Disruption
There is more blogging although we do not necessarily seem to call “blogs” the person-specific sites that people are writing any longer. We saw the rise of Substack (and its full on embrace of Nazis) and the inevitable Boomer-inspired reference to sites they host as “having a Substack”, like “having a Facebook” or “having a Twitter”. Medium, a site created by a Blogger and Twitter co-founder and involved in union busting its own employees, got a boost and they absorbed some of the chattering classes fleeing other closed gardens. We saw new platforms like Ghost appear. Over at WordPress, perhaps the most dominant blogging platform, we saw some real founder drama as the economic incentives shifted between platforms and plugins.
What a lot of these writers found is that publishing something doesn’t have any reach on its own. Platforms like Substack and Medium and Ghost have email built-in so that posts are distributed as they’re written. WordPress users can add plugins like Automattic’s JetPack and others to distribute their newsletters. Some email platforms have popped up—like Buttondown and Beehiiv—to meet this middleware need.
It is of no end of amusement to me that people complain about email and full inboxes but the only entirely reliable way to reach people is via email. We have a huge growth in RSS-enabled tools but are unable to adequately shift audiences out of their inboxes, even though we know that is one place too many messages are already a problem. Folks, get an RSS feed reader and get with the program. Publishers, you need to figure out how to monetize RSS.
One would think that the world looked bright for blogs, given all this activity. But now we have the news Typepad, one of the most venerable blogging platforms, is disappearing at the end of this month. Based on the continually maintained and developed Movable Type content management system, Typepad was, like Google’s Blogger (still available but not given much attention), an early hosted blogging platform. The Law Professors Blog Network is built on it so I hope they are planning a migration. Some of the blogs in the network have already moved on to other platforms and their own branding, like the Business Law Professors who are now running on their own domain name and WordPress.
At the same time, I have not seen a huge shift in the people blogging about law libraries. If anything, the number of blogs has diminished. I have noted this before but this blog is syndicated by LexBlog, which means it is now caught up in the joint American Bar Association The American Legal Blogger. But, as of today, it’s the only blog listed in the law library catalog.
At least their Subscribe link offers both email and RSS.
Build and Amplify
I do not blog for LexBlog or for the ABA Journal. It may be a surprise to some folks but I do not even blog for the American Association of Law Libraries. I am grateful for their help in amplifying my blog but that’s what our relationship is. A colleague asked me about this at the AALL meeting: how do I get this blog mentioned so regularly in the AALL KnowItAALL email (!) newsletter?
Someone at AALL saw a blog post and included it. And then again. And, like in so many cases, they kept coming back and finding other posts that they thought would be relevant. I’m incredibly lucky but I have to believe that part of my luck is due to the lack of other regular voices. It is also probably partly due to being somewhat regular, which can be important for people syndicating or aggregating other people’s information. But it is entirely due to the fact that I exist. I am pretty confident that the LexBlog channel (on their own site or on the ABA Journal partner site) for law libraries would disappear if they had no content in it.
In fact, there are three law library blogs listed as sources but two of them have not posted in a few years. I highlight them only because I miss their content but I completely understand—believe me—that blogging isn’t everyone’s jam and, even if it is at one point, it may not be as our lives change, our resources and interests change, and so on. We have been poking at blogging at my library—two of the law libraries I led had successful blogs and a third had one that we let sunset, which is likely the direction for our current effort—and it is only a worthwhile effort if it is a contribution and not a distraction.
They are not the only law library blogs I used to read regularly that have disappeared. I miss Notes Between Us and missed Sarah Glassmeyer until I realized she’d moved (she also sends out blog-like updates via email, which are literally the only email updates I read from any publisher; if you haven’t subscribed, you should). I used to follow Aaron Tay when he was on Blogspot but his choice to migrate to Substack meant that he was outside the platforms I was willing to engage with.
I was delighted to see new law librarian Sarah Scully start to post from Vermont. I learned about the blog via her Mastodon account and it captures so much of what was great about the blogosphere: personal writing, links to blogs she recommends, leaning into the DIY vibe. I regularly check in on RIPS-SIS and keep an eye on news alerts that pop up lots of organizational law library blogs. But I am sure there are more.
There are certainly many more law library blogs out there, corporate or organizational. I just wonder how visible, findable they are. For example, I would love to have some more law libraries visible on the Lexblog network, a free step that just requires a phone call or email.
Blogging isn’t for everyone. We have been dabbling with it at work but my first directive was that we were not going to get into a “feed the beast” approach to it. I have been at two law libraries where blog-like resources flourished (Hamilton County (OH) and the Law Society of Ontario). It takes resources, not least of which is time but could also include hosting fees or other costs to subscribe to tools. I completely get it and would not want anyone to put themselves out—figuratively or literally—unless they enjoyed it or it created some practical value. As I’ve said before, my motivation to blog is entirely selfish and the enjoyment I get and the mental health benefit is enough for me. Knowing that people read it and some of those people enjoy it is icing on the cake.
At the same time, our media platforms appear to be cratering, thankfully, in the case of Twitter. This fragmentation has lead to a return to the lowest common communication denominator, email newsletters in most cases, a step that I use too. It feels like it could be a good time for us to contribute to, and wrest away, the centrality of publishing platforms that centralize ownership and put authors in the predicament of building adjacent to literal Nazis. The first step may be for those of us who are already blogging or who have the resources to start to make sure that we have made sure we are visible. I’ve added a blog roll to my site and I am going to start to look more regularly for colleagues who are out there and doing the work. We will be stronger together.