Once Popular Blogging Platform Typepad is Shutting Down and What It Means for Legal Bloggers and Blogs
Labor Day Weekend brought news that Typepad is officially shutting down on September 30 after more than 20 years in business.
After that date, just 28 days from Tuesday, users will be locked out of Typepad and all blogs and content will be permanently lost if not exported before then.
There are no automated migration tools, only manual exporting which may make it difficult or impossible for some to save their content.
Why does this matter to the legal community?
Typepad was arguably once the most popular publishing platform with legal bloggers.
A large number of legal blogs remain hosted there today, including a good number on the Law Professor Blog Network.
It’s not just the active blogs that are at risk, but the decades of legal commentary and insight that the legal community and the public stands to lose.
We’re not talking content marketing, we’re talking the type of information and insight that should make its way into secondary law. Information that legal professionals and the public can look to for analysis of relevant legal matters.
LexBlog runs a managed WordPress platform for legal publishing and has handled many Typepad migrations.
We’re exploring ways to not only help legal professionals still blogging on TypePad, but to help preserve the legal commentary that is about to be lost.
I’d like to see the credible and citable Typepad content preserved in the LexBlog Network archives. I am unaware of any other publisher taking the preservation of the publishing of individual lawyers as serious, so I really don’t know where else it can go.
LexBlog stands ready to help all the law professors, practicing lawyers and other legal professionals that we can.
Inventing legal blogging, as we know it today, and being a leader in legal publishing for over twenty years, I feel it’s our obligation to help where when we can.
Looking for help or insight on what action to take, drop me an email, directly, at kevin@lexblog.com. If I cannot respond right away, I’ll forward it on to a LexBlog team member who can.
I’ll keep you updated the days to come.