Discourse.net: Tell Us How You Really Feel

Froomkin blogs on the snippy response from academics on blogging.

I think the snippy comenters miss the point. Blogs are too new for anyone to expect them to be challenging the academic litterature. But law is not like physics, theory and experiment interact, the result of an experiment (i.e. trial) changes from day to day, the theory (i.e. statutes) changes as well.

So law is not a static subject. Events data matters, if you are going to be a leader in the field you need to keep up with the latest cases, judgements, laws. Someone who is providing the authoratative feed of current information in any field is going to be considered field leader.

In the traditional scholarship model the academic jealously guards their ideas to stop someone else stealing them before the big publication that nobody will read.

I don't write many papers for academic journals but there are hundreds of articles published each year on my work. This is the old model of scholarship before computer generated indexes made it possible to use publication rate as a cheap indicator of academic performance. Citation indexes don't do this job either, write something really stupid, get it published and hundreds will cite you in their refutations.

Having the top blog in a field is going to be much harder to fake than citations.