Larry Ribstein has a post arguing that as a matter of communal blogging ethics bloggers ought to check, to some degree, and see if other bloggers have made points similar to theirs, and if so, link to them. He writes:
Here's the example: Blogger F has what he thinks is an original angle on a point or subject that either (1) came out of his own head or work; (2) relates to a major news story of the day; (3) picks up on something said by Blogger A; (4) relates to a minor news story. Blogger F cites the stories in (2) or (4) or Blogger A but does not cite Bloggers B-E who have made similar or related points. Assume for the sake of this discussion that Blogger F does not know about B-E -- proceeding in the face of such knowledge would present a separate problem.
In the academic setting, this ignorance of the prior literature would be a bad thing, a sign of academic negligence. What about in blogging, particularly by an academic blogger?
I think a similar norm should apply, though applied differently in this different setting.
I respectfully but strongly dissent. ...
Roughly, Professor Ribstein is advocating that bloggers engage in some sort of pre-emption check before posting their thoughts, at varying levels of scrutiny. The goal is to look not only for those from whom the blogger actually got the story, but to find blogs that the blogger doesn't normally read that simply happen to be making a similar point. This is generally required in academia, but it shouldn't be here.
First off, while Ribstein makes several arguments about how the level of scrutiny should be changed from academia to blogging, I think he fails to marshal enough of an argument about why academic pre-emption should carry over to blogging at all. He suggests that it will "hel(p) everybody economize on time", but I confess I fail to see how. It sounds like this will force bloggers to spend extra time reading blogs (and, presumably their myriad incomprehensible comments), and I fail to see how they make the time back up. Ribstein also points out that the ignored bloggers B-E do not like being ignored. This is true enough, but inconclusive. People may not like the fact that I fail to read their blogs, fail to link to their tiresome law review articles, or fail to shower them with large sums of money, but that proves little from a blogging-norm standpoint. I don't like the idea that a norm will force me to read much more than the 175 blogs that in my RSS reader, and surely my preferences count too.
Second, this kind of norm really would impose serious supply costs on blogging, and would therefore cause a lot of people to blog a lot less. I used to be hesitant to respond to any post until I had read its entire comment-thread. Given the lengthy, senseless, and incomprehensible comment-dialogue that could ensue at joints like the Washington Monthly, this meant that I basically never linked to Kevin Drum's posts because even the intrasite pre-emption check was too costly. And this is nothing compared to, say, the 790 comments from Harry Potter fans that Heidi Bond accidentally attracted. As one expands this requirement to include technorati, trackback, and sitemeter checks the costs go up. A lot of blogs are, quite frankly, not very good, and if posting about X means I am ethically obligated to read them, I am simply not going to bother.
This burden will be enhanced by Ribstein's proposed hierarchy, where "guilt" for failing to do a blog-preemption-check will be stronger for posts about popular articles and blog posts than for obscure articles or original ideas. This means that in the cases where the pre-emption is burden is likely to be large, it is also more mandatory. The result will be a lot fewer piece of commentary about popular articles and blog posts, at least by those of us who already spend more time blogging than we would really like to.
Third, the value of this sort of pre-emption check is dubious. If somebody else was a blogger's original source or inspiration for a story, that is one thing, but if somebody has merely managed to produce a similar version of the same post, who cares? Or, more precisely, how many people care, and why can't they go use Technorati and an RSS reader themselves if they do?
Fourth, one of the great things about the current norm, where bloggers link to posts only if they find them interesting or worthwhile, is that it creates some very rough Hayekian hierarchy in the blogosphere. Bloggers get linked to because people think they write or think well meaning that people with similar tastes in writing and commentary can find blogs that fit their tastes. Why should the blogging norm reward with links and eyeballs some badly-written and uninteresting blog whose main virtue was writing about something that other people also wrote about, only better?
Fifth, I think bloggers generally have plenty of incentives to read lots of other blogs about a topic themselves, without the need for a pre-emption-check-norm. Those who want to write the "definitive" post on a subject will be more likely to attain their goal if they do some reading. Linking to other blogs creates the incentive that they will read and link back. Furthermore, many blogs develop fanbases precisely because they link to an interesting range and caliber of blogs-- indeed, readers are better served when a blogger selectively offers up things he thinks are interesting rather than blindly pasting links around to both signal and noise alike.
Ribstein's proposed pre-emption norm will lead to decreased blogging and wasted time by those who follow it, and decrease the quality and filtering ability of blog posts, all for dubious, if any, gain. It should not be followed or encouraged.
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1. Posted by Vic Fleischer on July 21, 2005 @ 15:45 | Permalink
I'm with you, Will.
My vision of the best system would have a few bloggers out there doing a sort of "literature review" periodically -- sort of like the Journal of Economic Perspectives. Slate does this, although not in any sort of exhaustive way. So, after Smith, Bainbridge, Ribstein etc. blog about the Disney opinion (with no obligation to link to each other exhaustively) Fleischer could come along and summarize what happened, with appropriate links to all, and add some big picture thoughts.
2. Posted by Will Baude on July 21, 2005 @ 15:50 | Permalink
Yes. For example, Howard Bashman and SCOTUSBlog do this to some extent.
3. Posted by Ted on July 21, 2005 @ 16:07 | Permalink
I'm with Will and Christine. The problem Will identifies are especially true if there's a big story: there could be several dozen bloggers doing short links to it, and if I come across it independently in the NYT one morning, I don't feel the need to note that someone who was up later than I was last night got to it first. I read the Times before I read Bashman, and I often find stories before I see that Bashman has linked to the story; since Bashman usually just links, I read Bashman to do sweep-up to see if there's anything I've missed from my google-alerts and major newspaper reads; but it would be ludicrous for me to cite back to Bashman every time I post something if I didn't actually get it from Bashman. Regular blog readers know that Bashman will link first, and they come to OL or POL because Walter and I do commentary or because Walter and I talk about a different set of issues than Bashman does.
I do do searches on a number of things I post about, and I'm not sure that Ribstein realizes that these searches are becoming harder and harder to do in the legal field because of the number of spam blogs that randomly and mechanically aggregate news to attract google and technorati hits without providing substance. Imagine if Westlaw or SSRN worked like that! If I had an ethical obligation to do this kind of search for every single one of my posts, I simply wouldn't blog at all. Sometimes I find that a blogger has something more intelligent to say than I do, and I scrap my post, and just cite to the blogger. By coincidence, the second-biggest beneficiary of these junked posts has been Ribstein, which has meant that I now check his blog as a matter of course.
4. Posted by Karl on July 23, 2005 @ 19:08 | Permalink
In addition to the criticisms already raised, can anyone imagine journalism using preemption checks?
One quibble I might have with Will's description is juxtaposing "interesting" links to "signal and noise" alike. A "Fisking" is, imho, based on linking to noise. But perhaps this is a mere point of semantics.
5. Posted by Will Baude on July 24, 2005 @ 16:23 | Permalink
No, this is a fair point. There certainly are times when links to "noise" are useful (for purposes of example, ridicule, fisking &c.).
But the key word in my sentence was "blindly". It's not that bloggers should never link to "noise" posts, just that they should only do so when they have good reasons to. (And proving to the reader that they've read a bunch of bad posts-- good for them!-- is not a "good reason".)
6. Posted by Dylan on July 24, 2005 @ 17:55 | Permalink
When I blogged I chose my approach based on who could discover other posts with the least effort and the value of those duplicate or overlapping efforts. For popular or "deep" topics the reader can easily find good commentary with Google or Technorati and I didn't bother. On the rare occasion I wrote a fairly lengthy post on a serious subject on which blogosphere attention seemed light, I'd take the trouble to find and link to other bloggers, all of whom I'd inevitably never heard of. The biggest example of this latter approach concerned the FDA's recommendation that gays not be permitted to donate blood, a topic that got surprisingly little attention at the time.
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