Category Archives: Blogs

Mark Halperin Doesn't “Cover” the Freak Show. Mark Halperin Is the Head Freak

Yes, it's early, but I'm sure it's the winner anyway.

From the ashes of Stuck on the Palmetto rises South Florida Daily Blog run by Rick, who was half of the team on that much-missed local blog casualty.

The mission statement:

My primary focus with SFDB will be to do a daily review of most of South Florida's independent blogs and comment on some of the more interesting, unique, controversial or informative posts that are written during the course of any day. There is so much going on in the SoFla blogoshere, but at times it seems like everyone is scattered and doing their own things. With SFDB, I'd like to create a place where bloggers and blog readers can visit and get linked up to posts that are especially significant or noteworthy. At the same time, I'm hoping that people will find SFDB an enjoyable place to hang out, discuss the important issues of the day and interact with others who are just as interested as they are with what's going on in South Florida.

Prof. James Grimmelmann has an interesting post on Lawyers, Blogs, and Money, in which he asks — gently — whether those law professor bloggers who blog for money, be it sponsorship or advertising, run subtle risks of various forms of intellectual corruption.

Grimmelmann admits that in some cases these issues are unavoidable, especially for blogs that have such high traffic that their hosting costs become otherwise unmanageable. But the clear import of the essay is that in most, maybe all, other cases, law professors ought to think many times before taking that shilling.

And it's not because the shilling leads to straight shilling, although in theory it might. The dangers Grimmelmann points to are more insidious: caring too much about hit counts which can shape content; inflicting ads on the readers; truncating the RSS feed to drive traffic to the ads; not using a Creative Commons license in order to better monetize content; combing logs that ought better to be anonymous for data; seeing oneself as a competitor with other bloggers rather than participants in a shared enterprise.

This here is a non-commercial enterprise, but I don't claim any special virtue for it: no one, after all, has yet offered me a sufficiently tempting price. The readership here being comfortably 'B' list in size (but A+ in quality!), I don't have the sort of traffic which creates financial pressure. I don't take ads both because ads are ugly and because the likely revenue seems outweighed by the insurance consequences. (Yes, people do actually threaten to sue me from time to time.)

There's no point in Grimmelmann's essay that is self-evidently wrong, indeed most of the points represent the application of standard ideas of conflict of interest to law-professor blogging, but I think nonetheless he's more or less barking up the wrong tree with this one because almost all of these problems (other than the aesthetic and attention costs of the ads themselves) can and do exist with purely non-commercial blogs also.

Academic and Legal egos being what they are, I think there are a considerable number of people worrying about their hit counts in private. The egoistic desire to increase hit counts can affect content, the RSS feed, licensing and even motivate lack of linking (I speak as one very occasionally plagiarized…). Human nature.

Indeed, when I started blogging I marveled at the growing hit counts. Some weeks I had 3000 or more per day. On very good days, when I wrote something particularly original, I could get over 20,000 visitors to that post. Then I decided to stop worrying, and found myself happier.

Sitemetered traffic nowadays hovers above 1200 or so per day, plus the 1000+ one guesstimates read the RSS feed. And this is still a fun hobby. Which is the main reason why I'd say non-profit blogging is better for academics. Unless you have very high traffic, you won't make much money off it anyway, and it's one less thing to worry about.

[On the other hand, I completely agree with this post of Grimmelmann's.]

As a result of some rustication with a local journalist who threatened to out one of the authors, Stuck on the Palmetto, one of the very best, perhaps the best, of the local blogs is gone. It's not just closing shop, it seems to have taken its archive with it.

I'll miss it. Please guys, can't you at least leave the archive up? Local historians will want this some day.

(And if you ever want to guest post anonymously or otherwise, let me know…)

Say what you like about sometime discourse.net commenter Gary Farber, but even when he's having medical issues and hard times, he's not doing the hard sell for his pledge drive:

Amygdala: IT'S GARY FARBER PLEDGE DRIVE WEEK!

I've been understandably asked at times why someone should help me. And, truth be told, I can't think of any particularly good reason. So I certainly don't expect help from anyone: if you've done it before, you've arguably done your part. If you've not, there's no good reason you should start, and not help someone more deserving instead.

Gary is applying for SSI, because he hasn't worked enough to be eligible for Social Security disability.

Why's he asking?

I, in panic-stricken fashion, semi-coherently explained my situation of lifelong recurring clinical depression, as well as other health issues, and that I'd finally decided to apply for Social Security disability, having rightly or wrongly put off that option for decades.

I, with utter shame, loathing, guilt, self-hatred, and a feast of other negative self-directed emotions — as is my wont — asked for people's help, and an amazing number of people did help, in many ways, including the most important way to help, which was with hard cash. At the time, I said I was afraid I'd need to ask for help again within three months.

Now it's almost a year later, and I've just paid the December rent of $500 and the phone bill ($35), and I'm now down to a total of $241.00 in my bank account, and $22 in my pocket.

…

(The horrible fear that has loomed larger every day and night in my consciousness, and in the pit it creates in my stomach, in the past year is that you won't, in sufficient numbers, again. My fear is that one can't go back to the well again. That I'll wind up with only a few donations, and a few links, and just a bit of response, and have no idea what to do to survive with my disabilities and inabilities and problems until such time as my disability claim is approved. Terror over this has been the dominant theme in my life in recent months, and all I can say is that I'm hoping you'll help it go away, at least for a while.)

OK, maybe not quite the soft sell.

Every year I'm torn — give to people or give to causes? Mostly I do causes on the theory that systemic changes will in the end help more people. But the people need help now.