Dan Solove has once again updated his law professor blogger census, see this and this. He noted:
My latest tally is 235 bloggers, with 47 new bloggers and 14 bloggers who departed the blogosphere since my last census in November 2005. [Someone needs to coin a term for a blogger who has left the blogosphere — “blogged out” perhaps?] That’s a net increase of 33 bloggers since November 2005, where I had counted 202.
Dan Markel raised some concerns about how meaningful the census numbers actually are, stating in pertinent part:
To my mind, these stats seem inflated on a couple dimensions. Don’t get me wrong: I’m certain they are accurate in that Dan S. has dutifully reported all the information reasonably available to him. But I fear they are misleading in that various people (men and women) who are listed as bloggers are barely blogging, and certain blogs have relatively very few posts, and usually those blogs, and many others on the list, have very few readers.
I admit a little confusion as to why Markel felt the need to parenthetically break “various people” down into “men and women.” In any event, Solove offered this reply, observing:
I agree with a lot of what Markel writes. In my census, I do not look at the frequency at which a law professor blogs, so ones who post only once in a blue moon are still counted. I adopt this policy because I don’t want to create some rule for how frequently one has to post to be deemed an “active” blogger. Nor do I have time to check to see how often folks are blogging. So Markel is right — my census is limited in that it is basically a head count.
Law professors use Lexis and Westlaw to count how many times an article gets cited, and they get invested in how many times a paper gets downloaded from SSRN, so of course they are going to pay attention to how many times a blogger posts, how many comments the post elicits, how many posts a blog features, how many links a blog draws, and how many pageloads ultimately result in consequence. Law profs can’t resist quantifying stuff like this! But as long as we are talking metrics, how much revenue is generated by blog ads? Who runs ads and who doesn’t, and why or why not? These are statistics that would be interesting as well.
Let’s look at a few numbers related to the upcoming “Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship” Conference. Not counting the “Welcome” by John Palfrey and the “Introduction” by Paul Caron, there are 22 speakers, 20 of whom are law professors, 19 of whom are law professor bloggers.
Out of the 19 law professor bloggers speaking, four represent a single blog, the Volokh Conspiracy (Yes I am aware that Orin Kerr now has a blog of his own as well). Three of the other law prof bloggers are part of The Borg (a.k.a. the Law Professor Blogs Network). All four of those blogs, plus, as far as I can tell, at least four of the “independent” law prof blogs, run paid “for profit” type advertisements. So do the blogs of the two “non law prof” law bloggers represented. Seven of the blogs represented, however, do not seem to feature “for profit” ads (exempting ads for books and other publications authored by blog contributors).
Is this representative? Are the majority of law prof blogs running paid advertisements? Are the majority of law prof bloggers getting paid for their efforts? Shouldn’t that be part of any “how blogs are transforming legal scholarship” type conversation? Generating income from any form of legal scholarship is an accomplishment bordering on the miraculous in many respects, but not one that should go unobserved, or uninterrogated.
