joegratz.net

I’m liveblogging from Blog Law and Blogging for Lawyers, presented by Law Seminars International.

Mary Hodder:

[She starts with a quick primer on blog terminology.]

A blog is a person. You trust, and you read, the reasonable people. Other bloggers will fact check you; if you post falsehoods, you will be discredited.

Q: A good book on blogging? A: Rebecca Blood, The Weblog Handbook.

[She does a bit on how to start a blog using Blogger, recommending hosted services like Blogger or TypePad for all but the geekiest.]

Google is optimized for the static web, counting links. Searching the “live web” is different, and requires a tool like Technorati.

What are metrics? Why do we care about live web search? We care because it skews Google results and because people go online to see who has authority, who’s saying what about a particular incident, etc. We count inbound links, numebr of subscriptions, and other metrics. But there aren’t great metrics right now.

There are various live web search engines, including Bloglines, Blogpulse, Feedster, Pubsub, and Technorati. Compare the services and see which ones represent the view of the live web you’re looking for.

Tagging is a user-generated keyword mechanism. Communities end up growing around particular subjects because they use similar tags. Tag both for yourself and for others.
There are various methods for determining a blog’s statute, and each search service uses a different one. Some are immediately apparent, like the number of comments on each post.

She posted about Jerry Reynolds, a notorious USENET spammer; her post was picked up by various other bloggers, and her post shot to the first hit on Google, when he had been 15 pages back.

Blog search tools can be used to find influencers.

Splogs exist — spam blogs. Blogger + Adsense + Google rankings = Splogs. Will this change? Maybe not; Google makes $150M/year from them. But we hope so.

Useful blogs will create conversation, be useful, create authority, etc.

Q: What about separating personal and professional blogging? A: Many bloggers separate, say, the baby blog from the corporate blog. Some put it all on one blog and categorize, and users can subscribe to the categories in which they’re interested. You don’t have to put your full name on your personal blog to keep it from popping up on Google for the full name. Kids on MySpace and LJ are blogging about incredibly personal things that could be a problem later. Will these kids end up demanding a statute of limitations on stupid adolescent web posts? We haven’t figured it out yet.

Q: How much time do you spend blogging? A: Not enough. I’ve been building Dabble, so I’ve been busy. But before that, maybe 1.5 hours a day both reading and posting. I didn’t post in a vacuum, so reading and posting went together. The web is a social place. It’s a completely flexible tool.

Q: Will this replace professional magazines? A: No. The interface that is a magazine is so much more pleasing than a computer screen that it’ll never go away. Newspapers are in serious trouble, though.