Dave Hoffman, over at Concurring Opinions (or Co-Op, as us cool guys call it), give us a score card of the old guard Law Professor blawgs, distinguishing between traffic and authority.  More significantly, the latest way to keep score is how many times a blawg is cited in a decision, which has got to be pretty darned cool if you’re a law professor (or even if you’re not), considering that law reviews no longer de rigor for thoughtful appellate rulings.

But law profs and practical blawgers come from different places.  They have that “publish or perish” thing going.  Plus, they discovered blogs while we were busy in court defending clients and trying cases and have a big leg up on the practical blawgosphere.  They post about academic studies while we post about how young lawyers should never go to court wearing their underpants on the outside, no matter how cool they think it makes them look. 

The box score that Dave uses is made up of two different components.  The traffic component is how many different people actual go to their blog.  This is made of two components as well, that being unique visitors and repeat visitors.  And then there’s the subset of people who click on the jump to read the full post versus those who just check out the front page to read the headlines and see if anything interests them enough to look further.

The other component, what I call authority, has to do with how many other blogs (and now court decisions) cite or link to their blawg.  This creates an acknowledgment that a blawg has something to offer to the readers of another blawg, and tends to provide a certain reciprocity between the readership of blawgs.  If you like x, then take a look at y.  What Dave discovered in his tally is that blawgs that are similar still have entirely different sphere’s of readership, so that you may like Simple Justice but inexplicably don’t check our a very simpatico blawg, Defending People. 

For those who view their blawgs the way rappers view their bling, there are even awards and conventions for bloggers.  I feel fairly confident that Simple Justice will not be winning anything this year.  In the practical blawgosphere, we tend not to blaze new paths in intellectual discovery, but rather deal with a far more mundane world of lawyering in the trenches, with the occasional attempt at humor thrown in.  Our commentary is more goal oriented, and our politics often predictable.  Of course, that doesn’t harm the 2006 Award winner for best legal blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, not one of my personal favorites but obviously one read by a whole lot more people than Simple Justice.

I also just learned that there’s something called Blawgworld 2007 (download pdf) that is supposed to reflect the best of law blogs for the past year.  Except it doesn’t even note the existence of most of the blawgs that I read daily, no less include them in their “best” series.  It’s definitely an old guard sorta thing, kissing up to the big time blawgs and totally ignoring the practical blawgosphere.

And so, I guess that provides a decent segue into the only score that matters to me in the practical blawgosphere.  If I write something, will anyone read it?  I write because I chose to.  But there would be no point in all the additional clicking (not to mention debugging angst) that goes along with having a blawg if nobody came.  I get a pretty good number of readers every day.  Some days more than others, but my traffic is good and my authority is decent.  It provides me with a reason to post whatever I write, and not just hand it off to someone else to publish under their name as I had done for years.

It would make me happier if Simple Justice showed up in other blawgs with greater frequency, and in new blawgs more often.  It would be nice to have more subscribers.  It would be really nice if readers would leave comments, particularly comments that gave me a clue what they were thinking rather than just filling in the stupid poll at the end of the post that they have “no opinion.”  Why bother?  This blawg was intended to be a discussion, not a lecture. 

Get in the game and participate.  Perhaps that’s the scorecard for the practical blawgosphere.  We may not be cited by the Law Profs (I don’t think they even know we exist) or in Supreme Court decisions, but we’re standing next to you in the trenches.  If you tell me what you’re thinking every once in a while, I’ll consider Simple Justice a huge success.