Dan Solove at  Concurring Opinions and Orin Kerr at  Volokh Conspiracy are discussing whether the blawgosphere has stabilized.  According to Orin,

The major new blog was David Lat’s Above the Law, which has quickly become highly trafficked. But there were surprisingly few new blogs that took off, and many more blogs that looked bright in 2006 but became mostly or entirely dormant in 2007. Most of the major blogs have kept going, and readership on the whole has been roughly stable. But my sense is that there hasn’t been a lot of growth in overall law blog postings and readership.

Dan largely agrees:

I think Orin is right — partially. Here’s where I think he’s right. Many blogs have very small audiences. Only a few law blogs have more than 1000 readers per day. My guess is that the number of law blogs with more than 1000 readers has not increased dramatically over the past few years. There are so many blogs that a person can read, and many folks have found their favorites now and are content. Of course, there’s always the possibility of an exciting new blog on the block that will quickly attract an audience. But in our experience at Concurring Opinions, it takes time and lots of work to build an audience.

This discussion, of course, is one amongst the big boys, the A-list of the old line blawgosphere.  To give you an idea of what this means, when Orin post a link to one of my posts here, I saw a jump in reads to the tune of 3500.  Let me tell you, that’s a huge number, and it was clearly a product of being linked over there. 

But I think that both Dan and Orin, perhaps because they are now old line blawgers or perhaps because only the broader interest law blogs find a permanent place on their radar, have underestimated the worth of niche blawgs in the practical blawgosphere, of which Simple Justice is proud to be a member.

When I started, less than a year ago, I was thrilled to reach the 100 reads a day level.  This exceeded my expectations, and I really had no idea whether anyone would bother to come and read anything I wrote.  Today, my reads typically exceed 1000, usually in the area of 1500 a day.  Granted, this is a minute fraction of the potential audience, even for the niche of criminal defense law, but this reflects 1500 people who could spend their time doing something else, but choose to stop by, see what’s here, and spend a few minutes reading.  It’s really very gratifying, and I consider this experiment a huge success.

Will I ever reach the exalted levels of Davit Lat?  I doubt it.  His blawg draws from a very different universe of readers than mine.  And the reason people go to ATL is very different as well.  If I was a biglaw associate, I would read Lat’s blawg religiously.  It has the dirt that I would want to know.

But enough about me.  There are a bunch of blawgs in this niche, listed on the sidebar, that are alive and healthy.  For the most part, they are all newbies like me, started within the past year and thriving.  I suspect that Dan and Orin are too high on the mountain to see us little niche blawgs so far below them.  But guys, we’re here, we’re expanding out reach and our voice, and we’re doing just fine.  We aren’t going to interest the broad groups that others reach, because we focus on our own little corner of the blawgosphere, but we have established a place for ourselves and are becoming firmly, and happily, entrenched.

So before you dismiss the blawgosphere as being stable, and conclude that there’s no new life down here, don’t forget about us little guys, toiling away in the practical blawgosphere.  Even though we may not command a huge audience in the blawgosphere, we are as big as anyone else in the courtroom, and what we bring from there to here matters as much as what anyone else has to say.