Long live blogging

Author and Chair of Happy Cog, Jeffery Zeldman (@Zeldman), writes that he succumbed to calling his online writing “blogging” when Rebecca Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook‘ came out on the early 2000’s.

Nobody in the mainstream had noticed a decade of independent content producers, but they woke up when someone started calling it “blogging.” By the way, what an appalling word that is. Blogging. Yecch. I held my nose at the time. But I also held my tongue. If calling your activity blogging was the price of recognition and attention, so be it, my younger self said to itself.

It was Blood’s book that turned me on to blogging as well – in a different way. I had started a TypePad blog days before reading her book. Until then I didn’t really know what the heck a blog was or what purpose they served.

Reading Blood, I knew in a minute that blogs were perfect for lawyers. A lawyer sharing insight and information in straight down to earth talk would enable them to enhance their reputation and build trust with people.

Conceivably lawyers “could” publish online before blogs, but as Zeldman says, we were struggling to find something more fluid. “A place where everyone, not just appointed apologists for the status quo, could be heard.”

So true. Before blogging, writing and published belonged to a select few in the law.

I’ve got a passion for equine law. As a practicing lawyer, I want to share it with the world. What are you going to do about it? Start submitting law review articles? That’s the provence of law professors. Write a book? Good luck finding a publisher and distributing it to everyone in the equine industry.

A whole different story with blogging. The Equine Law Blog and a year later you are speaking to the National Breeders Association at the Kentucky Derby. That’s the democratization of publishing.

I’m with Zeldman that whether the term “blogging” turns out to be a passing one doesn’t matter.

Blogging may have been a fad, a semi-comic emblem of a time, like CB Radio and disco dancing, but independent writing and publishing is not. Sharing ideas and passions on the only free medium the world has known is not a fad or joke.

What we do know is that short form social media on platforms owned by others than you, the lawyer publisher, will not cut it.

Yes, recycling other people’s recycling of other people’s recycling of cat gifs is fun and easy on Tumblr. Yes, rubbing out a good bon mot on Twitter can satisfy one’s ego and rekindle a wistful remembrance of meaning. Yes, these things are still fine to do. But they are not all we can do on this web. This is our web. Let us not surrender it so easily to new corporate masters.

“Blogging” or “online publishing.” It doesn’t matter.

What matters is that all lawyers, not just the anointed few, have the opportunity to share ideas and passion.

Image courtesy of Flickr by Beverly and Pack.

H/t: Scott Fennell