Real Lawyers Have Blogs : Law Blogs, Social Media, Twitter

Jeff Jarvis says the corporate Blog Council misses the whole point, it's not the blog, it's the conversation that's key.

When I was in London, I sat with folks from the BBC in an afternoon devoted to blogging, and the woman next to me was troubled, bearing weight on her shoulders from having to fill her blog and manage her blog. To her, the blog was a thing, a beast that needed to be fed, a never-ending sheet of blank paper. I turned to her and said she should see past the blog. It's not a show with a rundown that, without feeding, turns into dead air. Indeed, if you look at it that way, you'll probably write crappy blog posts. I've said before that if I think I need to write a post just because I haven't written one, I inevitably come out with something forced and bad. Instead, I blog when I find something interesting that I've seen and I think, 'I have to tell my friends about that.' You're the friends. So yes, I said, it's just a conversation. And reading — hearing what others are saying — is every bit as important as writing. It was as if scales were lifted from her eyes and weight from her back: She's just talking with people.

Mom always said 'God gave you two ears and one mouth and he did it for a reason. We are supposed to listen twice as much as we speak.'

With Jeff, 'It's not about them writing blog posts. It as much about them reading everybody else's blog posts.'

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Cisco, Microsoft, Dell, and a number of other large corporations have launched a so-called Blog Council. Best I can tell from their press release they're going to create rules and standards for ethics-based corporate blogs so we'll know how to use blogs and engage the blogosphere the right way. "We can work together to develop model policies that set the standard for corporate blogging excellence," says Sean O'Driscoll, General Manager, Community Support Services for Microsoft.

Better hide this news from the state bar regulators and the large law firm legal marketing professionals. They love creating rules and standards for things they don't understand. Can you imagine the likes of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, Reed Smith and Baker & McKenzie getting together with state bar ethics regulators to develop standards for lawyer blogging excellence? That way firms who had never blogged would know to use blogs and engage in the blogsophere in a responsible way.

Better than invent a new standard, let's just us the Airbag Department of Security Blog Advisory System. It was carefully developed last year in response to Tim O'Reilly's Blogger Code of Conduct. Though designed so that blog publishers could alert their users to the threat condition of words being used on a blog, with a few tweaks and a call to Greg Storey it may do the job.

Rather than trample free speech, we post warnings to protect the innocent. Take a look.

I've been approached by more than one lawyer to sit on a council or advisory board to develop standards for ethical law blogging. I'm serious. I declined as I did when they called to develop standards for the ethical use of a fax machine. We survived.

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