Blogging : Cost effective legal publishing
Blog pioneer Dave Winer, who's always viewed computers as a publishing tool, sees blogging as the leading edge in publishing in the first decade of this century.
And Dave cites Clay Shirky, a consultant and teacher on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, as to what blogging as meant to cost of publishing.
Forget about blogs and bloggers and blogging and focus on this -- the cost and difficulty of publishing absolutely anything, by anyone, into a global medium, just got a whole lot lower. And the effects of that increased pool of potential producers is going to be vast.
Whether you're Thomson West publishing legal treatises, ALM publishing legal periodicals, a law firm publishing newsletters, or a law professor publishing law review articles, you ought to be looking at blogging as a very cost effective means of publishing. In addition to reduced costs, blogs offer a means of distributing content. Content that is also more timely than that published in traditional fashion.
Kevin - Agreed that the blog as a platform is a very cost-effective means of publishing any time sensitive information and that it will extend far beyond the original concept of a blog.
But, as you'll agree, "blogging" is about more than publishing. I note Clay Shirky's comments are from an interview way back in April 2004, so we must surely disagree with his assertion that:
"The word blog itself is going to fade into the middle distance, in the same way words like home page and portal did. Those words used to mean something relatively crisp and specific, but became so overloaded as to be meaningless."
Even if they use a blog CMS, we won't talk of newsletters, collections of articles etc as blogs, but to my mind "blogging" will live on as the term used to define the "naked conversations" which have popularise the medium.
No doubt what you say about blogs having a conversation component Nick. That's the secret sauce of blogging that's not apparent to many people who view publishing a blog as a one way conversation.