Hi Neal,

 

Your blog looks very interesting, as I share an interest in linguistics (though you wouldn’t necessarily know from my blog).  I note that SJ isn’t on your blogroll, isn’t mentioned in any of your posts about the book, or anywhere else on your blog, as far as I can tell.

 

Thanks for letting me know about your posts on the Scalia/Garner book.

 

Scott

And that was the end of it. No reply from Neal to my email.  I checked back to see if Neal put SJ on his blogroll. He didn’t. Fair enough.  But then, why initiate an email to me in an effort to get me to link to him? 

Perhaps he sent out dozens, even hundreds, of emails in an effort to get his blog noticed. Perhaps he’s trying to garner some interest beyond linguistic nerds.  All fine things to do, but then, where’s the conversation?  He wants me, and perhaps countless others, to lend him a hand and a link, but he gives nothing in return?

Kevin O’Keefe posted about his meeting with Robert Scoble the other day. Scoble is one of those guys who tech-lovers cream over, and Kevin’s admiration gushed:

Through his blogging I came to truly understand how the Internet and marketing is a conversation. It was in November, 2005, when Robert said if you don’t talk about me in your blogging, I can’t hear you. Not meant to be egotistical, he was referring to the need to join the conversation by engaging others… 

That was November, 2005.  It’s now 2012, and the message needs repeating.  The problem is that those of us who have been around the blawgosphere for a while are not here to play a critical role in your self-promotional efforts.  We aren’t your marketers. We don’t have blawgs so that we can get people to notice you exist. We don’t work for you.

You want to join in the conversation? Great. Love to have you.  But that’s not really what you want, is it?  You want to promote yourself, and you want me to do it for you. Because the blawgosphere exists only to help you.  Come on, isn’t that what your marketer told you?  Tell the truth. You know he did.

I’m pretty liberal with spreading the link love. When I find a new blawg I like, I write about it to let others know. When I discuss another blawg, I link to my source. This practice is now old school, and found primarily in first and second wave blawgers.  The new wave (7th, 8th maybe?) are all about them. They would never link elsewhere as that wouldn’t serve their marketing efforts. Why send potential readers someplace else, where they might find a lawyer they like better?

It used to be that it was extremely easy to see who linked to you everyday.  There was Technorati, and Google searches, which were generally pretty reliable sources. Both have “improved” themselves to the point of worthlessness, and I really have little clue about other blogs who link to me.  You would think such a thing would be quick and easy given the advanced state of internet technology, but it’s not.

Back in 2005, it was still easy to find out that someone was talking to you. New blawgers tend not to have conversations, but monologues. Their only interest in others is what the others can do for them.

Kevin has tried valiantly to get this message across to his Lexblog clients. There are a few who engage. The vast majority do not, linking to no one, talking to no one, writing only for their own self-promotion. This is one of the reasons why Kevin puffs the posts of his clients in his Top 10 in Law Blogs, which shockingly is limited to people who pay Kevin.  If he didn’t do this, no one would know his clients existed. They aren’t part of the conversation.

Things have changed, and continue to change in the blawgosphere. Old guys (like me) are taken for granted as if we exist to help the new guys.  New guys don’t give a hoot about anything but themselves.  The volume of noise has risen to eleven and it’s drowning out the conversation, to the extent any still happens.

My reply to Neal’s email was meant to send a message. Maybe he didn’t get it. Maybe he did and didn’t care. Maybe it angered him because he asked so nicely for a link and fully expected that I, one of the brethren of lawyers with blogs, would naturally accommodate his request.  And instead, all he got was a snarky reply from someone to whom he offered nothing.