The other night, I was honored to be invited to sit with Kevin O’Keefe as part of a panel on blogging at the NYCBA. Not, not the criminal bar association, but the other one, also known as the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. Joining me at the table for the CLE was New York Personal Injury Blogger Eric Turkewitz and Dan Clement from the New York Divorce Report Blog.  It was an experience.

Kevin’s raison d’être is to bring blogging to the masses, provided theu’re lawyers and could use a turnkey blog.  Kevin took a huge risk asking me to join him, since I have this occasional tendency to be slightly contrarian.  But watching Kevin at work was enlightening, both for his mastery of the technical and his passion for turning every lawyer into a blogger.

What I failed to appreciate until the other night was just how difficult Kevin’s job could be.  In a room where people paid good money to learn something about blogging (Kevin hates the cutsie word “blawging”, mostly because it doesn’t play well with Google), the learning curve was a killer.  Those of us who dally in the blawgosphere (oops, sorry Kev, blogosphere) have at minimum a basic working understanding of the gig.  These would-be bloggers had none. 

How much “none” did they have?  Well, how about almost an hour spent on the extraordinarily complex subject of “what’s an RSS feed?”  Ironically, no one mentioned the words “really simple syndication,” which might have insulted the folks busily writing down every word about how to put a blog into a feed.  Yes, I know.  It’s a click and it’s done.  Turk said, “just go home and play with it for a few minutes.”  I said, “it’s something you just have to do, not talk about.”  Kevin had a powerpoint presentation on just this aspect.

Kevin understood something that Turk and I did not.  The people who know that there’s something out there called the blogosphere don’t want to understand it. They want a how-to manually of the technicalities.  They want “Blogging for Dummies.”   Not only that, but some of the audience members were pretty aggressive about the fact that they didn’t want to hear anything about what makes a blog successful, or interesting, or effective.  They wanted to the keys to the car without knowing what to do once they got the sucker moving. And they wanted them NOW.  Of course, this was New York, and some people tend to be a little more assertive around here than in other places.

The CLE turned out to be far less about blogging than remedial computing.  While Turk, Dan and I were sitting around looking pretty, we have little to offer on the RSS feed subject.  We were there to talk about blogging content and etiquette, how to spread the word you exist without pissing off the rest of the blogosphere, how to get others to read what they write.  There was a little of this, but not much.  We were mostly eye candy (I wish) at the front table for the Kevin O’Keefe show.  But it was Kevin’s show, so there was nothing wrong with that.

Kevin and I had numerous disagreements about what path to take to become a blogger, but then we approach the subject from opposite ends of the spectrum.  Kevin promotes blogging as the new means to marketing, and because of this focus, has a clear vision of certain choices a new blogger should make.  Since my view is that marketing should never be a blogger’s purpose, and demeans the blogosphere, I see the choices differently than Kevin.  But both Kevin and I meet in the center when it comes to the point that no blog can succeed without a dedication on providing substance to the blogosphere. 

The primary difference in our approaches was obvious when Kevin told the room that every one of them would be a blogger if they only tried.  I disagreed.  The blogosphere doesn’t want everyone of them to be a blogger.  It wants as few as possible as blogospheric Darwinism takes over.  They can all try, but most will fail, and that’s how it should, and must, be.  The blogosphere cannot accommodate everyone, and will be brutal when it comes to thinning the herd.  But then, I’m not selling turnkey blogs, so I have no reason to be overly optimistic.

But Kevin put himself out there to open the minds of this crowd to the potential of the blogosphere.  It was a terribly difficult task, as the audience proved by question after question that they didn’t understand anything about blogging.  For me, the sense of the audience was captured by a question late in the CLE, “how many hours a week does it take to blog?”

My answer was “how long must a man’s legs be?”  Kevin’s answer was an hour or two was sufficient.  I wondered how many times Kevin has been asked that question before, and how hard he has to bite his tongue when he gives that answer.  But that’s what the people want to know.

Post Script:  After the CLE, we all have dinner at a barbecue joint down the street.  Kevin’s a great guy, with this funny Seattle accent.  You should have seen his eyes grow wide as we walked across Times Square.  If I was going to buy a turnkey blog, it would be from Kevin, but I wouldn’t let him name it for me.