Ann is a natural-born blogger. Her interview in connection with the ABA Journal 100 is short, but it reminds me of sitting across the hall from her, talking about blogging. She really hasn't changed her attitude about blogging in over four years, and that's pretty amazing ...

ABA Journal: How long did it take you to find your voice?

Althouse: I think I had my voice on the first post. From day one, it felt like I'd been dying to do this.

ABA Journal: Tell me about some of the biggest hurdles to doing regular posts.

Althouse: I have none. I wake up every morning ready to blog, and I do that before anything else. During the day, when I can, I go back to the blog. The real problem for me is overblogging, not underblogging.

ABA Journal: Have you ever experienced burnout or writers block? And how did you get over it?

Althouse: Blogging is energizing for me, and I never feel burned out. Sometimes it takes me a while, reading through things, to find something I want to write about, but I consider that part of writing. You need to read with a flexible, open mind and have an eye for the bloggable. Once you see something that is bloggable, start writing. Let it flow. I like to write to see what I think, to observe my mind at work. I free associate, and since I'm pretty old, I have a lot of material to weave in. Another thing I do is photography. If I take a photo-walk, I come back with things I can make into posts.

ABA Journal: What have you learned from the blog world regarding direct, immediate feedback? Does that cause trouble for you in your day job?

Althouse: I'm fortunate to be a tenured law professor and to work with people who appreciate nontraditional writing, including a lot of writing that is only tangentially about law (or not about law at all). As for the direct feedback, I love it. I'm always checking the traffic statistics, seeing who's linking, and reading the comments. Even when people get mad at me, call me a fool, and slander me, I love being one of the characters on the Internet stage.

ABA Journal: Would you encourage other legal professionals to blog? What advice/cautions would you share?

Althouse: If you want to blog, blog. Otherwise, don't. If you don't find it intrinsically rewarding to live freely and continually in writing, on display to the world, then don't waste your time. If you're contemplating a website that will work as PR for your legal practice, I don't care what you do. I'm not interested, and I won't read you.

The last paragraph is a classic: If you want to blog, blog. Otherwise, don't. Substitute any intransitive verb for "blog," and you have some pretty good life advice.

As for the dismissal of PR blogs, it's all about authenticity ... if that word is not too dated.

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According to Typealyzer, which reads the content of a blog, and classifies the sort of person who writes said words, we are scientists.  Scientists!  Here's what it means your Glom writers are like:

The long-range thinking and individualistic type. They are especially good at looking at almost anything and figuring out a way of improving it - often with a highly creative and imaginative touch. They are intellectually curious and daring, but might be physically hesitant to try new things.

The Scientists enjoy theoretical work that allows them to use their strong minds and bold creativity. Since they tend to be so abstract and theoretical in their communication they often have a problem communicating their visions to other people and need to learn patience and use concrete examples. Since they are extremely good at concentrating they often have no trouble working alone.

Via.

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About a month ago, a reporter called and asked my views on "why don't more women blog?"  My first response was whether this topic had not been beaten to death.  Ugh.  So, basically I had two responses.  The first, which I've given many times before, is that blogging is actually a great way for any scholar, particularly a scholar-parent trying to find a good balance, to meet the goals of going to conferences on a weekly basis (networking, marketing, learning, brainstorming), without leaving home.  Second, I said that the question should be tabled until someone mines the emprical data.  Do women and men law professors enter the blogosphere at the same rate?  Do women leave at a higher rate?  Are departures by women prompted by the same sorts of reasons that men give?  Time?  Comment trolls?  Lack of readership?  Unpleasantness of the enterprise?  Surely by now we have enough hard data, surveys could be conducted, etc.

So, the article, Where Are All the Female Law Bloggers, is up now on Law.com, with discussions with other female law bloggers, including Mary Dudziak (Legal History Blog) and Kathy Bergin (The Faculty Lounge).  Mary responded on her own blog here.  Ann Althouse posted her own reaction here.

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Slate's business site The Big Money launched today (not sure if that was the plan before Thursday, or if it seemed like the right time - and boy was it).  It leads with a critique of the government's decision to let Lehman die.

The Big Money doesn't exactly have a thousand mile view on the question.  The Slatesters note that Lehman's gonna go for pennies, and if the Fed had backstopped the deal, Barclay's might have got it for two bucks a share or whatever.  Isn't two bucks better than pennies?  And don't we know that at some point, Lehman's assets will start looking a little better (though check out the fallout of the S&L crisis - that cost the government $160 billion, and kept lawyers busy for years)?  They also, kinda surprisingly, talk about short sellers, and they cite the decline in the 30 random stocks in the Dow, not the other indexes, as evidence of economic weakness.

We're lawyers, so we won't opine further.  Here is Felix Salmon:

yes, the Fed treated Bear and Lehman very differently -- but that's the whole point. The last thing that the Fed wanted was for the Bear Stearns bailout to set a precedent, and for bond investors to have confidence lending to any US bank, safe in the knowledge that the Fed would always ensure they were paid back in full. The US government's contingent liabilities are quite big enough, thank you very much, without adding the entirety of US bank debt on top.

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Welcome to a recent entrant into the blogosphere:  Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog.  Some veteran bloggers and guest bloggers, like Paul Secunda, Keith Sharfman and Michael O'Hear, lead the charge.  Welcome to the blogosphere!

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Apparently, it escaped our attention last December that two bloggers out there were having a go at our name and taking it a bit in vain, so it seems.  The first blogger, Mr. Verb, seems to be a linguist and was taken aback by Gordon's suggestion that university presidents be paid salaries determined by a free market.  Mr. Verb then decided to back up his argument that free markets have no place in the university's mission of disseminating information with an attack on our blog's name!  (Is that an ad nominem attack?)

For me, conglomerate has a very negative ring to it. It calls to mind the buying of companies to drive up stock prices, where people got rich off manipulating markets, not by producing goods or delivering services.

Mr. Verb then backs up his perception of the connotation of the word "conglomerate" with a Wikipedia entry. (I'm no linguist, so I'm trying to use big words like "connotation" quite carefully.) Now, I would tend to disagree that conglomerates are bad and point out that some conglomerates do quite well by letting star divisions subsidize "rising star" divisions or seasonal divisions. In fact, conglomerates are quite communitarian, which is why they sometimes aren't very efficient. I would think that someone who didn't quite care for free markets might like the conglomerate model. But I digress. . . . What's more, Mr. Verb links to his blogfriend Nancy Friedman, who likes to think about why linguisitics blogs choose the names that they do. This must have led Nancy, on her blog, Fritinancy, to start slamming our name as well. Fritinancy hates "conglomerate" as a name as well. She thinks the "glom" sound isn't very sonorous and puts people off. She thinks that the term "conglomerate," even though it could describe either a conglomerate corporation or a conglomerate rock, doesn't tell her how we will make her a smarter person. She thinks it is a weakness that our name doesn't tell her more about what we will be doing. As an aside, Fritinancy points out that lawyers are uncreative in naming law firms -- always with the names of their attorneys, for goodness sakes. Unfortunately, most state bar rules require this, Fritinancy. Our creativity has been regulated away to protect consumers of legal services from the very branding which you seek in a law firm.

Stepping back, let's remember the names of the two blogs that are criticizing us: Mr. Verb and Fritinancy.  Gordon wonders if Mr. Verb could team up with Mr. Morton, Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla, and Lolly Lolly Lolly at Conjunction Junction and make a complete sentence.  Gordon and I were split on Fritinancy.  He thought it meant Fried Nancy, but I thought it meant Fritter Nancy, as in "I just frittered away some time at Fritinancy blog."  Gordon looked at her blog and it means the chirping of a cricket, or a metaphor for a nonresponse.  Great name for a blog -- sort of like blah, blah, blah I guess.

But, let's look at the popular law blogs and their names according to the expert linguistic criteria we've been given. I could go on and on, but I'll pick two blog names that I don't think pass the test: Volokh Conspiracy -- uh, oh. "Conspiracy" is a very, very negative word. Some conspiracies are even criminal. There's no such thing as a criminal conglomerate at least. Conspiracies work to further a crime, or a cover-up, or a disinformation agenda. Wow. I bet that's a very struggling blog. And, it's named after a founder. Very uncreative. Prawfsblawg -- ugh. If any syllable is worse than "glom," it's probably "awf" or "awg."  Sorry, just spreading the word.

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When I first guested on this blog, I checked out its value on this oh-so-reliable calculator.  If you didn't think too carefully about the methodology, you could conclude that the blog was worth $135,489.60 then.  What has happened since I was invited to join the permanent roster? 

We're now worth $111,778.92.  Approximately.

What could possibly account for the massive destruction of a fifth of the blog's value?  I think the answer is pretty clear.  Rising fuel costs haven't helped.  Bad weather in the Midwest clearly played a role.  But more than anything, what we can learn from this exercise is this: the global economy is unquestionably in recession.  HT: Volokh

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Paul Caron has updated his quarterly law prof blog rankings.  Glom comes in 17th in visitors and 19th in page views (aggregated over the last 12 months (July 07-June 08)).  Seems pretty respectable .  .  . much better than coming in the top five.  According to Leiter, four of those five "have almost nothing to do with law," and four "are right-wing or far right-wing in their political orientation." 

Whew.  Dodged a bullet there.

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Meredith Miller, a professor at Touro Law Center, has started a very interesting podcasting project on a wide variety of legal topics entitled "The Slippery Slope."  We have from time to time had posts on what podcasts to listen to while commuting, etc., and Gordon has experimented with podcasting Glom stories in the past, so I am very interested in seeing this project develop.  I am already looking forward to a future podcast on street vendor law and advocacy!  Professor Miller is not stranger to the blogosphere, having been a contributer to ContractsProf Blog.

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Kieran responding to Fabio's post, "why i blog."

My primary reason for blogging is not on Fabio's list. I blog because writing for an audience forces me to think more critically about the information that I consume. Pre-blogging, I was a huge consumer of information, but an intermittent analyzer. Analysis takes time and energy, and I was so busy consuming, after all ...

So when I tell people that blogging has changed my life, I mean it in a very fundamental way. A few days ago, I ramped up my blogging because I decided while I was away at various conferences and speaking engagements -- reflecting on my habits and routines -- that I needed to incorporate blogging more fully into my life as a scholar and teacher. I was thinking exactly along the lines expressed by Ann (here and here) earlier today, in a somewhat surprising take on Rush Limbaugh:

I think he knows that doing things day-by-day keeps the show alive and makes it work. It's what works in blogging too. If you have a whole planned agenda and you just crank out the propaganda, people will get sick of you. It's when you are talking/writing to figure out what you think, to find out what you want to say, that you are interesting. (They didn't do that on Air America.)

By the way, most of you know that Ann is a former colleague. Her office was directly across the hall from mine at the University of Wisconsin Law School, and we started blogging at roughly the same time. I never told her this while I was there, but perhaps it's deserves saying publicly that I have learned and continue to learn more about blogging from Ann than from any other source. We each have our own styles, but I believe that we both love blogging for the same core reason: because of what she calls concisely "thinking by writing."

Why do you blog, if you do? If you don't, why don't you blog?

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The very smart Bernadette Meyler (who does public law and law and humanities at Cornell) has started blogging at the interesting findandreplace.  Good stuff on Vermuele on Carl Schmidt and Boumediene already, so give it a look, why don't you?

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If you don't find some new interesting blogs on this list, you are more plugged in than I am. Or you don't find law blogs interesting. Whatever the case, one blog on this list is this one.

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Lots of bloggers are talking about Apture. I hope that Apture page loads for you, because you really should see it, if you haven't already. But all of the attention the service is receiving today may have overloaded the circuits. I can't get to the site, and I can't get it to load on Conglomerate.

It was working earlier today, and I did a little test in this post. But my test link is gone now. I am not sure where it went.

If it worked, this would be a very cool service. Simple. And it allows any website owner to enhance content with multimedia. Take the tour ... if you can.

UPDATE: Ok, Apture is working again. I like the pop-up multi-media, and I hope the company survives and improves on this product.

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I assume this Gawker Media style guide is new to our readership.  I know I learned something.  For one thing, I realized it's not that Dan Solove, Concurring Opinions' rumpled polymath (he's a triple threat! Books, blogs, articles!) can't manage the prose.  It's the pictures.  Depictions of keyboards?  Wikicommons ganks of the spines of old books?  If you're going graphic, Dan, mid-level IT acquisition guy PowerPoint sales pitches isn't the only model available to you.

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Wall Street 24/7 tells us what the biggest blogs are worth ($150 million for Gawker, down to $860 thousand for the heavily trafficked, but political, Talking Points Memo), and what I want to know is: what about those who don't make the cut?  Put Marginal Revolution and Volokh to the side - presumably money doesn't mean anything to tenured people.  What about How Appealing?  Or Above the Law?  Why was Wonkette sold for zero?  Daily reads to many people you know, but not, apparently, worth 860 grand all in - and Dead Horse Media has a bunch of paid bloggers to sustain. It makes me think that Paul Caron may not want to get that box at Churchill Downs just yet.  But we at the Glom (value: $135,489.60) still wish him a happy fourth anniversary.

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Just when you thought that blogs might be getting a little stale - I've been reading them for years now, and the ones that make it past the age of five with any grace at all are rara avis - enter the young Washington grouphouse.  So here's to the Volokhs - you guys still look great.   But  I must say, the Yglesiases, Sanchezes, Kleins, McArdles, and videoblogs by same aren't always my cup of subject matter, but they do have a good, vibrant thing going.  And, as the Times reports, they all live together.  Does this remind you of your summer associateship?  I was sort of transported Proustian madeleine-style, and I write this from the Murky Coffee in Arlington, VA, where I am probably surrounded by bloggers like the ones in the profile.

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Check out the new blog from Jennifer Martin, Kristen David Adams, Robyn Meadows, Marie Reilly, and Keith Rowley called Commercial Law. The tagline: "Commerce, n. A kind of transaction in which A plunders from B the goods of C, and for compensation B picks the pocket of D of money belonging to E."

Hmm. Strange pitch for a gaggle of commercial law professors.

But Marie Reilly's post on "The Morality of Trade" gets things back on the right track. It concludes, "Commerce is not a cuss word."

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My friend and co-author (Interactive Citation Workbook), Tracy McGaugh, has launched a new blog, Millennial Law Prof, to discuss her research interest in teaching theory, particularly as applied to millennial law students.  I have seen Tracy speak a half a dozen times on Generation X, Y, etc., and I always learn something knew.  Welcome to the Blogosphere!

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There's a new law professor blog up, The Faculty Lounge, involving Dan Filler, Laura Appleman, Al Brophy, and others.  Looks like one to add to the Google Reader.  But are they really going to give up the secrets of the faculty lounge?  The on-call masseuses, the chilled caviar and champagne, the student workers on hand to peel grapes and cut the crusts off the cumcumber sandwiches?  It turns out that there might be such a thing as too much disclosure.

But welcome nonetheless!

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A new sign of our tremendous influence here at the Glom is that we're banned in China.  Even our name must tip our hand that we're a hotbed of capitalist roaders.

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The Times reports on a Canadian guy whose volunteer-staffed dating website garners him $10 million a year for 10 hours a week of work.  I'll note that this guy has one employee, and that there's nothing in the article to suggest that he has created any legal structure at all for the site, or that he has even developed the sort of network of contracts that might obviate some of the advantages of the corporate form.  I predict litigation.  Still, given that Google has a dual stock structure, and that Craigslist is similarly leanly-staffed and informally structured, is this the three-makes-a-trend proof that the web 2.0 is where business organization goes to die?

Perhaps not.  But it certainly may be evidence that my co-bloggers need to start monetizing this site toot sweet.

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Dave Hoffman has an insightful post on the future of corporate law scholarship here.  He explores a few schools of thought; I've often wondered whether one of the dominant ones - checking the effect of various corporate governance options on stock prices - might find it difficult to engage with the increasing popularity of partnerships, LLCs, and other private entities.  Here's Bainbridge on it.

And Steven Davidoff, has jumped from the M&A blog to the New York Times Dealbook blog.  A nice opportunity for a hard-working blogger, and here's Ribstein and Bainbridge with more.

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Frank Pasquale at Concurring Opinions has a post about my colleague Danielle Citron’s presentation at the Yale Symposium on Reputation in Cyberspace, in which she focused on how group dynamics in cyberspace may prevent women from effectively participating online.  Citron of course notes that the Internet has a powerful and positive impact on reputation building in cyberspace.  Unfortunately, however, because the Internet not only facilitates the formation of groups without regard to geographic boundaries, but also allows such groups anonymity, the Internet fosters an environment that facilitates destructive mob-like group behavior.  The social psychology research that Citron has reviewed to date reveals that while both men and women are victims of online attacks, women receive significantly more attacks than men.  The result is that women have found themselves either refraining from participating in cyberspace or participating under gender-neutral pseudonyms, which, as she notes “throws us back to the nineteenth century, when women wrote under gender-neutral pseudonyms to avoid discrimination.”  Citron’s work reveals that while the Internet enables us all to connect in very important and productive ways, it also has drawbacks—and some of those drawbacks can be quite destructive.  In this regard, Citron reminds us that being a member of an online community has both benefits and responsibilities.

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I told you guys I read the book, now go read the review - and even better, get a chance to pipe in with a comment for Daniel Lyons, Fake Steve Jobs himself.  He's over thataway as well.

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Paul Caron has all the relevant links:

I am delighted that the papers from our symposium on Bloggership:  How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship, held on April 28, 2006 at Harvard Law School, have finally been published in 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1025-1261 (2006).  (It is, of course, ironic that a symposium on how blogs are transforming legal scholarship is finally published over 18 months after the event and after the papers were first posted online.)

Among the papers is a very short essay by me entitled, Bit By Bit: A Case Study of Bloggership, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1135 (2006) and one by Christine (with Tung Yin of Iowa and The Yin Blog) entitled, Blogging While Untenured and Other Extreme Sports, 84 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1235 (2006). 

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Every day, thousands of us bloggers give away free stuff over the internet--our "content."  Scott Adams of Dilbert fame had an interesting musing on blogging giveaways in yesterday's WSJ. He blogs about a third of every work day, and his blog draws what he calls "an army of volunteer editors, and they never sleep."  Instead, "the masses told me what they thought of the day's offering without holding anything back." 

After a time, Scott decided that he and his blog minions were in fact writing a book, so he compiled the funniest posts and pitched the idea to a publisher.  He got a six-figure advance.  The publisher asked him to delete the parts of his blog archive that were to appear in the book.  No big deal, right?  Traffic there was sparse. 

Wrong!  Fans were outraged.  They were personally offended that he would remove free stuff from the internet so he could sell it in book form.  "It was as if I had broken into their homes and ripped the books off their shelves.  They felt violated.  And boy, I heard about it."  The hostile sentiment found its way to Amazon.com, where the book got negative reviews, not for its substance, but for the fact of its once-free content.

Scott recounts another experiment, where he posted an entire book of his--God's Debris--on the web for free, hoping it would spur sales of the already-published but slow selling sequel--The Religion War.  Fans loved the first book so much,they couldn't wait to get the sequel--for free, on the internet.  By giving away the first book, Scott had "inadvertently set the market value of [the sequel] at zero."   Oops again.

Free is complicated.

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My great friend Andrea Schneider has started a new blog, Indisputably, which focuses on topics related to dispute resolution.  Other bloggers include Nancy Welsh, Michael Moffitt, and Sarah Rudolph Cole.  The post at the top is provocatively titled "Why I Want to Negotiate with Ann Coulter."  Welcome to the blogosphere!

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One of the important functions of academic blogs is to provide a public forum for dissemination and discussion of new ideas. But what are the ground rules governing academic seminars? Great discussion over at orgtheory.net, starting with this comment.

UPDATE: More from orgtheory, this time from Fabio.

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The Juggle is a W$J blog with the subtitle: "WSJ.com on choices and tradeoffs people make as they juggle work and family." The choices and tradeoffs people make, not just women, though the current posts have a definite feminine slant.

Browsing The Juggle prompted me to reflect on an issue that sometimes arises in law school: whether a law student should be allowed to bring a child (children?) into the classroom. This issue touches not only on the learning environment for the parent, but for all of his or her classmates. My experience has been that children in the classroom are always a distraction to someone, even when they are well-behaved or sleeping. And children in the classroom are not always well-behaved or sleeping.

As a general rule, therefore, "no children in class" seems like the right default rule. Nevertheless, I have permitted students to bring children into my classroom (and even brought my own children two or three times over the years) when child care unexpectedly fell through. Does that seem like a reasonable approach?

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Jay Brown of TheRacetotheBottom.org has a working paper on blogs and law school rankings. It contains a bit of discussion about blogs and legal scholarship -- ground that was covered quite comprehensively in the Bloggership Conference last year -- but the main thrust of the article is that blogs "represent a cost effective mechanism for improving a law school's reputational rankings and, perforce, its overall rankings in the infamous US News and World Report."

Hmm. Let's look at the evidence presented by Jay:

• Law school ranking depends importantly on law school reputation, which in turn depends on scholarly reputation, which in turn depends on law review placements. Law reviews have a "modest number" of "prestige slots," and those slots tend to be allocated to professors at top tier law schools, thus creating a self-perpetuating reputational loop. Even if professors from a lower-tier law school manage to generate multiple top placements, law school reputations are notoriously sticky, and marketing campaigns designed to change those reputations are expensive.

• SSRN is also biased in favor of top-tier law schools. The evidence here is that the most downloaded professors are at top-tier schools. (Downloads are based on reputation ... see above.)

In contrast to law reviews and SSRN, blogs are egalitarian. Anyone can start a blog. As for the connection between blogs and law school reputation, Jay writes:

There is no definitive data on the relationship between an active, popular blog and law faculty reputation. Nonetheless, common sense and conventional wisdom suggests that a high quality blog can result in increased reputational benefits for the blog sponsor which in turn can generate increased awareness of the relevant law school.

And this:

[H]igh quality, substantive specific blogs arguably provide disproportionate benefits to lower tier schools. For these law schools, the dearth of information about academic reputation is the most severe. It is probably fair to say that most of those who respond to the US News Survey have at best spotty understanding of the 180 or so law schools included in the rankings. As a result, a reputation score can arise from incomplete information, anecdotal information, or information unrelated to a school’s academic achievement.

Any widely disseminated positive information can increase awareness of an institution among the small number of people who fill out the survey. This may occur through the introduction of innovative programs, the sponsoring of widely noted and attended conferences, and other similar developments. But dissemination will be slow and the costs high. Blogs require fewer resources and will reach a broad audience more quickly.

None of this strikes me as wildly implausible, though  the argument as a whole contains an astonishing number of causal links, most of which are supported only by "common sense." This is, of course, typical in arguments about reputation. The question that Jay would like to answer but cannot is whether blogging, even good blogging, by a law professor enhances the reputation among academics of that professor's sponsoring law school. Even without answering that question, some law schools have begun to recruit top bloggers in an effort to enhance their reputation. I won't name names, but I suspect that the practice will become clear soon enough.

Even if blogging has some effect on law school reputation, we might wonder whether blogging is the most productive means of obtaining such an effect. As noted above, Brown claims that blogs "represent a cost effective mechanism for increasing reputation," but is that true even when you consider the opportunity cost of blogging? Brown himself notes that a "good blog is an avaricious consumer of time." Perhaps that time would be better spent writing articles? On the other hand, some have observed that bloggers tend to be productive scholars ... which way does the causation run there? Perhaps blogging generates more ideas or germinates ideas more quickly or creates scholarly networks in which co-authoring is more likely. Is blogging a win-win proposition? I hope so.

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Two startup companies are looking to improve blog comments. Check out Fed Wilson's new comment system from Disqus and TechStars' new comment system from Intense Debate. Both systems offer threading and the opportunity for comment ranking, but Intense Debate's systems seems more feature rich. David Cohen at TechStars gushes: "Intense Debate solves a major problems with blog comments - namely that they just suck."

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Thanks to Dan Solove for again updating his Law Professor Blogger Census (2007 Version). This is an improved version, as Dan has weeded out the deadwood. In Dan's estimation, the law professor blogosphere has "stabilized," meaning that we have some entries and some exits, but no longer large growth spurts we witnessed a few years ago.
 

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Dan Solove has made his (semi-annual, now annual) contribution to the study of the blogosphere:  Law Professor Blogger Census 2007.  Readers are giving Dan corrections, etc., so the chart may change over the next few days.  Specifically, Dan is asking for information on "deadwood bloggers":  bloggers who are listed on the blog's "letterhead" but haven't posted for two months or longer.  The elimination of these bloggers should change many of the rankings as the big "faculty blogs" list many professors as bloggers, but a smaller number post with any frequency, or even post at all.

And of course, I have to note that the University of Illinois has 8 bloggers!  We even have our own web page:  http://www.law.uiuc.edu/blogs/.  Andrew Morriss has not been listed yet as he is transitioning from Case Western, but I'm sure our web magician will be on that right away.

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Conglomerate recently entered into two distribution agreements, which I will discuss in more detail in a later post, but one of the relationships required a bit of navel gazing because we were offered royalties. We have never accepted advertising (despite lots of offers), and we have avoided attempting to make money from blogging. Money changes things, especially when the end product is a collaborative effort, and we want to keep this operation simple. We blog because we love to blog. So we ended up signing a distribution agreement without royalties. We left the money on the table.

That probably comes off sounding a bit smug, but I don't feel smug. We didn't leave a lot of money on the table. And I still read and enjoy lots of money-making bloggers, including some in this BusinessWeek slideshow, which estimates Boing Boing's revenue at over $1 million per year. Wow!

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Paul Kedrosky raises an interesting possibility about the fallout from John Mackey's excellent internet adventure: "while anti-stock-blogging/posting clauses haven't yet hit CEO/exec contracts, they will. And soon."

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Dave Hoffman has an excellent post on the state of the legal blogosphere over on Concurring Opinions. It tracks quite closely a long email I sent to my co-bloggers at the beginning of the summer. I look forward with anticipation to Dave's promised post on where legal blogging is headed.

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I just completed the Academic Blogger Survey. I usually don't like completing surveys because the ambiguities in the questions drive me batty, but this one was well constructed. I was forced to confess that I spend way too much time online, so I am going cycling with my wife and children tonight. (Glad I am not in Atlanta!)

The question that made me pause longer than any other was whether I considered academic blogging to be: (a) research, (b) scholarship, (c) teaching, (d) service, (e) none of the above. Given that I have written about this topic, you would think I would have a ready answer, but the right answer is "it depends." That wasn't one of the options.

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Renee Jones,  Associate Professor at Boston College Law School, has started a new blog:

Welcome to the Corporate Law and Democracy Blog, a repository of ideas, comments and papers on a range of issues related to corporate law and democracy. My aim is to bring together concepts and theories from a variety of legal disciplines that touch on questions related to the internal governance of corporations and the influence of corporations and corporate law on our political and social structure.

Renee already has a raft of posts and we are looking forward to more. Welcome, Renee!

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Most blogs have several widgets. Some bloggers are widget crazy. We at Conglomerate are very discriminating in our use of widgets, but I found this survey of the Top 50 widgets from Lijit quite interesting ...

By far the most popular category of widgets is analytics (about two-thirds of blogs have at least one analytics widget), and Google is the leader by a mile. Some surprises (to me):

• Only 22% of blogs have Sitemeter. That widget seems ubiquitous among the blogs on my reading list.
• MyBlogLog appears on almost 15% of blogs, but it seems not to have hit the law professor blogs, yet.
• Truth Laid Bear looks to be on less than 4% of blogs. There was a time when everyone had the Ecosystem widget, it seemed. We took it off a long time ago.
• The Twitter widget appears on as many blogs as the Amazon Associates widget.
• I have never heard of about half of those widgets.

HT Brad Feld.

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. . . here.

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Well, if you spend much time in Cincinnati, eventually Paul Caron will make you a blogging offer you can't refuse!  Barbara Black, the Charles Hartsock Professor Law and Director of the Corporate Law Center at the University of Cincinnati College of Law, is now the editor of the new Securities Law Prof Blog.

I'm very excited about this blog.  As readers know, we spend more time taking about corporate governance issues than securities law issues, as do other corporate law blogs.  I think this will add to blogospheric discussion and Conglomerate discussion as well.  Also, I just like Barbara!

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Former University of Houston dean and future UNLV professor Nancy Rapoport has unveiled her new solo blog here.  Nancy played an integral role in Wednesday's AALS Workshop on the Ratings Game.  You may be interested in her follow-up thoughts on her blog.  In addition, Bill Henderson gives other post-conference thoughts at the ELS blog.

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Steve Bainbridge is back in the blogosphere!  His main page, which is a portal to his three blogs, is here.  His business association blog, one of those three, is here.

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About a month ago, Conglomerate was added to Blogburst, a syndication service that sells content to newspapers. As far as I can tell, we have not received a single link from Blogburst. Sounds more like Blogbust.

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Steve Bainbridge has decided to withdraw from political punditry and turn his popular site into a "niche blog focused on business law and economics." This is good news for those of us who go there primarily to read about insider trading or corporate law, and I believe that it will strengthen the blogging sector to which Conglomerate belongs by adding Steve's more focused voice.

From a personal standpoint, I can understand Steve's decision. General interest blogging is hard work.  Conglomerate has become more tightly focused on business and law over time, partly because we have expanded the number of bloggers and our common interest is business law. But I suspect that another explanation for this development is that those of us who blog here find that blogging about work is easier than blogging about all manner of other subjects.

In any event, I wish Steve the best with his new venture.

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I have a question. This evolving medium, the blogosphere, allows us to float ideas for drafts or get preliminary reactions to partially completed work. How risky is that? Sure, blogs may or may not be scholarship. But does the blogger have any claim over emerging ideas she blogs about? For example, I think there might be something I’d like to write about the publishing propensity of the Delaware judiciary. Maybe there’s nothing to the idea—that’s why I wrote the post, to see what people thought. Blogging, to me, is about circulating ideas and getting a conversation started. But is there any blogging norm that prevents a lurker from stealing “my” topic? I think it’s pretty safe to say that posting a draft on SSRN is staking out a claim to an idea. But what about blogging? Is that enough?* I think the answer’s no, right?

*If it is enough, then consider the Delaware judiciary’s publishing propensity mine. Mine, mine, mine. I spit on it. It’s mine.

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Jonathan Schwartz, Sun Microsystems' CEO, is one of the very few Fortune 500 CEOs with his own blog.  Seems pretty courageous, given all the disclosure headaches one might have to worry about before hitting the SAVE button.  On the one hand, there are lots of things you know, but can't say.  OTOH, legal and business constraints and your self-censorship might make you boring as a blogger.

But I digress.  He's now asked the SEC to allow blog postings to satisfy Reg FD disclosure requirements.  Recall the Reg FD was meant to remedy problems of selective disclosure.  When company sources disclose material nonpublic information to covered persons (e.g., investment analysts), public disclosure is also required, either through the filing of an 8-K or some other method "reasonably designed to provide broad, non-exclusionary distribution" to the public.  FD disclosures are typically done via press releases, press conferences, or publicly accessible telephone conference calls or webcasts (see, e.g., NASDAQ rules on FD compliance).  To date the SEC has not taken a position on whether web posts alone will satisfy FD.  Schwartz's letter to the SEC is posted--where else?--at his blog.

Schwartz has been ahead of the pack as the first Fortune 500 CEO to start his own blog.  The only other Fortune 500 CEO blogger I know of is Whole Foods' CEO John Mackey, but according to Randall Stross, a Silicon Valley business professor writing in NYT, Mackey's blog is boring.  As of July 30th, according to Stross:

Mr. Mackey has made a total of six posts over the course of 10 months, and these consist of reprints of speeches and interviews and similar materials created originally for a different purpose. Using blogging software to park a reprint once every two months does not a blog make.

As of this morning, Mackey last post was June 26th. 

Stross' article laments to absence of CEO bloggers, who could be blogging more  information flow to the public markets.  Stross applauds Schwartz's uncommon courage for posting "his thoughts, very much on the fly, five times a month for two years. Over time he has earned credibility by his willingness to put in public view his unfiltered ruminations on a regular basis."  Schwartz even authored a piece in the Harvard Business Review titled, "If You Want to Lead, Blog."

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