Blogging at thirteen years. What’s changed?

I started blogging thirteen years ago, as of last Tuesday. What’s changed?

Blogging was not about writing articles then. Blog posts, usually pretty short, often referenced what others were writing. So much so that a ‘trackback’ feature displayed on your post the posts which linked back to your post.

By referencing what others were writing we were having a conversation. The conversation was often between people with niche expertise. As such, there was a lot of collaboration and learning taking place.

In my case I was learning from other bloggers what this blogging thing was all about. By reading, networking and writing I was learning an awful lot. Enough so to establish myself as a person of some knowledge when it came to blogging for lawyers.

People watching this dialogue among those viewed as thought leaders could identify trusted and reliable authorities, perhaps a professional who could help them in a time of need.

People, whether they blogged or not, got to know bloggers and learned to truste them.

With sharing, citing (linking) and dialogue, the focus was not on content marketing to demonstrate how smart you were. The focus was not on distributing your content in an effort to garner traffic to your blog and ultimately your web site. People hired legal bloggers because they were viewed as trusted and reliable authorities as a result of being “in the discussion,” not because people were attracted to a website by those measuring subscribers and web traffic.

Bloggers were givers, not takers. The goal was not to draw attention to ourselves. The goal was to share with others what we were reading on the web, offering our thoughts on why we shared what we did. We often added our insight.

Thus the term, “blog,” an abbreviation of the term “weblog,” which described the activity of logging one’s activity on the web.

There were also bloggers as a source, as Dave Winer, perhaps the founder of blogging and publisher of Scripting News , characterizes bloggers. Bloggers were intelligence agents on niches reporting on what was not otherwise reported by the mainstream media.

Others were sources in the form of intelligence agents by finding and “funneling” relevant items for others. Dave Donaghue, who’s published Chicago IP Litigation for almost a decade, is such an example by cherry picking cases from the federal district and appellate courts and summarizing them for others.

Bloggers tended to be driven by individuals. We got to know bloggers, even those covering things professionally, as people. We cited bloggers. Today we have group blogs by law firms where five lawyers are listed as “the bloggers” on a two paragraph post.

Blogging was our only voice to the world. There was no Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. When I wanted to invite folks to join me for beers when on the road (Beer for Bloggers), I did so on my blog.

When we wanted to discuss someone’s blog post other than on our own blog, we commented on other’s blogs. Law blogs, other than those who really offered opinion and commentary, never generated a lot of comments, but comments are now virtually non existent. Discussion of blog posts, if it takes place at all, is on other social media today.

Perhaps the biggest difference was the personality shown by bloggers. Look at this picture of Perry Mason with the caption, “Hmm, I should have a blog” which ran on my blog for its first 6 months. 

I cleaned things up a bit when I started LexBlog in early 2004, but you get the point.

Here’s to the next thirteen years.

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