Gee whiz, and I put words in your mouth? 

I’m absolutely sure that there are bloggers (or blawgers, as I prefer) who write (or pay someone else to write for them, as Ed promotes) as a marketing tool.  But Ed, you’re a marketer.  You see the world and all its wonderful things as merely potential marketing tools.  Pretty flowers, and significant concepts, are mere weapons for the marketer to sell, sell, sell. 

But don’t project your view on me.  I realize that your focus may not allow you to see any purpose to doing anything if not to market, but that small world in yours, not mine.  And there are others who, like me, don’t sit down at their computer every day to try to figure out some new way to sell themselves to potential clients by writing on their blawg.  Yes, some do, but not all.

I don’t begrudge the market savvy lawyer his effort to use a blawg to promote himself.  But don’t begrudge the rest of us our blawging for the sake of expression.  There really are pure hearts in this blawgosphere who post for no better reason than to right wrongs, express views and find an outlet for our opinions. 

So why does your position on hiring a ghostwriter to blog for an attorney give rise to such a strong reaction here?  Because it demeans what those of us who are not soulless self-aggrandizing scamming marketers do, and calls into question the entire blawgosphere, both in motive and content.  Must I prove to readers that I really wrote what appears after my name?  Must my bona fides in expressing opinions be suspect because some marketer is out there telling attorneys that blawgs are nothing more than client-grabbers? 

In fact, maybe I’m some out of work journalist wannabe writing this for some guy named Greenfield who wants to pretend that he really gives a damn and these are really his views, reducing everything here to some fictional world of self-promotion via the pretense of anti-self-promotion.  Talk about Machiavellian!  I’m a genius.

This is not like a brief written by an associate under my name, as you try to spin in your example.  Work product for a client is not an expression of personal opinion designed to reflect the views, opinions and inherent credibility of a specific person.  It is work for hire for the purpose of presenting a client’s argument.  This blawg is not.  This blawg purports to be written by my hand, you can bet your bottom dollar that’s exactly what it is.  If my associate wants to write something, he can go to Overlawyered and try his hand.  This blawg is mine.

So here’s the bottom line, Ed.  There will always be people who will take something that is offered at face value and turn it into a cynical scam for the purpose of personal gain and at the expense of credibility. This is big business in Nigeria, by the way.  But don’t project that manipulative motive on me.  You write for your purposes.  I’ll write for mine.  But don’t taint my efforts as being some happy mercenary scheme designed to suck in clients.  Not everyone falls into that little world where nothing is done if not for personal gain.