Every now and again, I take a spin around the blogosphere to see who’s still alive. I check my own blogroll to see whether blogs that were once vibrant are now dormant. I check the blogrolls of others for blogs I’ve never read before or blogs that once held some interest but for one reason or another have failed to keep it.
So many are gone. So many dead links.
There are many reasons why blogs die. The bloggers were sold a bill of goods by the marketers that social media was the future of the law, and they learned that it was a load of crap after the 12th telephone call from a person desperately in need of a lawyer. Pro bono. The bloggers learned that it isn’t easy to write a couple times a week, particularly if you want to produce content of any substance. The bloggers learned that if you post crap, nobody comes. The bloggers found out that telling others how great you are really isn’t going to help your practice.
What I find particularly interesting is the correlation between blogs with grandiose names, or pompous claims, and blogospheric failure. I suppose this is due to the fact that the lawyers who desire the most readily searchable names are likely to be the lawyers least capable of producing a worthwhile blog.
What this does produce, unfortunately, is a ton of flotsam and jetsam left behind in the blogosphere, the sort of debris floating about the ether into which the unwary will crash. Bear in mind, dead blogs don’t necessarily go away, but simply exist like the ancient shipwrecks at the bottom of the ocean, except with nothing interesting or cool about them. A better analogy would be the lawn signs of losing candidates left along a highway, reminding people that the candidate lost until the signs finally deteriorate and disintegrate. But nothing disintegrates on the internet, so the reminder of the failure of these blogs could be there forever.
It’s understandable that many lawyer wanted to hop on the bandwagon when blogs were the newest, coolest thing going. It’s similarly understandable that it didn’t work out, whether because it failed to produce your desired outcome or you just couldn’t handle the pace. It’s okay. Blogging isn’t for everybody. And blogging certainly isn’t the magic bullet to success that its promoters contend.
But when you decide to call it a day, I ask you one thing. Take it down. Pull it. Remove it, once and for all. Do this for me. More importantly, do this for you.
For my purpose, you’re leaving your litter and cluttering up my blogosphere. Clean up after yourself so the blogosphere doesn’t become a dump, a wasteland of old/bad news.
For your purpose, your dead blog is a tombstone. When someone googles your name, they may find your old, ugly, dead blog, a monument to failure. Is that the image you’re seeking to promote? Trust me, when your last post dealt with a novel bit of news from October, 2008, you’ve brought yourself no glory. It makes you look bad, particularly when your sidebar proclaims that you’re on the cutting edge of legal news and thought, and that your blog reflects how great you are as a lawyer.
There was no expectation that every lawyer would one day have a blog, except from the folks who make their living off selling lawyers blogs. The rest of us knew that this wasn’t for everyone, and didn’t serve the purpose that motivated the vast majority of short-run bloggers. So you had to find out for yourself? Fair enough.
Now that you’ve given it a shot, and moved on to greener pastures like twitter, please take your old blog down. Consider it the greening of the blogosphere.
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As the owner of two dead blogs, I wrestled with this issue. When I switched my legal focus, I thought it made sense to create a fresh, new blog for the new focus. The readers of the old ones would probably not be interested in the new focus and the name would no longer make sense.
But I decided to keep the old blogs up, and left a goodbye message.
For me, the incoming links to specific blog posts were the motivation for not deleting them. People (surprisingly) found posts interesting and created inbound links. Just because I was no longer providing new content did not seem to have an impact on whether the old content was still useful.
Silliness.
When you call it a day, I hope you (or your heirs) don’t take down Simple Justice.
So, um, does this mean I should delete the old InjusticeInSeattle.org site?
I’ve been sort of back and forth about it really, but I’m still open to killing it off.
What the other Mark said.
It’s one thing if someone starts a blog and it goes nowhere—few articles, few visitors, no links. If that’s the kind of blog you’re talking about, then yeah, they should go ahead and delete it.
But if you’ve built up a blog that has some real content to it—as you have with Simple Justice—then you have an obligation of sorts to leave it up as long as you can. Well, not really an obligation, of course, but it would be the kind thing to do.
You can say goodbye, close the comments, and stop posting, but it’s a bad idea to delete it. People are reading it. Other bloggers are linking to it and telling their readers to check it out. They depend on it being there. If you delete it, you are removing something important from the web. You are a vandal.
Yes, yes, I know. I don’t get to tell you (or anyone else) what to do on your own blog. But I can tell you how I feel about it. I’m still a little pissed at Norm (Norm!) for taking down his blogs when he went away (the first time). He left a lot of broken links behind.
Ignore the peanut gallery. I’m not talking about people with real blogs, but the fly by night ones that had neither links nor readers connected, exactly as you suspected. There are a ton of these that never make it onto our (or anyone else’s) radar, and no one knew they were there and no one knows they are dead.
They don’t have good-bye messages, but just one, final, lousy, sad post. And then silence.
So, now that I’ve been doing a blog for the past month (and linked to this one, by the way), I have to contemplate what to do if I give it up. Sigh.
I’ve gone to plenty of dead links. But I’ve also missed a few blogs that had stuff worth a return visit even if nothing was being added.
The complications of being public.
Welcome to the blawgosphere, Jeff. It’s not easy to start a blog and get noticed. We’ve been through some suggestions here from time to time, mostly linking to other blogs in your posts and leaving comments (like this) to let people get to know you. Putting other blawgs in your blogroll is nice, but not part of the conversation. You would do better to read what some of the other crim law blawgers are talking about and get into the discussion. Hope it goes well and look forward to hearing more from you.
By the way, a month is nothing. I think I had 2 readers after a month, and Mrs. SJ only did it because of extreme coercion.
I’m considering publishing it if I can find a roll of toilet paper long enough (and triple ply, of course).
Scott, you could have saved us all a lot of agita if you had stated “I’m not talking about people with real blogs,” up front in your posting, rather than buried deep among comments. Of course, I’m happy to hear that you didn’t mean “real blawgs,” because you saved me a lot of effort responding to this post.
It’s been a hundred days since f/k/a closed down, and it’s still getting 1000 or so visits a day. Thank goodness for people Googling (and ogling) Wendy Savage, Shakespeare and Lawyers, the meaning of “goombah,” the pitfalls of value billing, and even “Scott Greenfield”.