Which Law Blogs Do Faculty Read?

We will continue our discussion of In re InfoUSA tomorrow.  For our most recent post, go here.  Today, we briefly digress to examine an important aspect of law blogging. 

Law blogging is often a daily chore and an avaricious consumer of time.  Bloggers, therefore, often wonder about the success of the efforts.  Success foremost depends upon a blogger's own definition.  But from time to time it is interesting to see how others perceive the blog. 

One way to do this is to consult the various services that rank blogs.  These ranking systems generally use their own proprietary system for ranking and, as a result, can produce radically different results.  In general, blogs are ranked either by traffic to the site or by the number of other sites that link to the blog.  Google, for example, used the latter.  In the case of those counting traffic, they may use a particular stream of visitors (rather than all visitors), such as those that use their search engine.  My paper on the subject, Blogs, Law School Rankings, and TheRacetotheBottom.org goes into greater detail on how various sites rank blogs. 

Another measure of success, however, is whether the blog is read by the right audience.  This, of course, requires identification of the right audience.  In the law blog area, it could be decision makers, lawyers within the speciality area of the blog, and other segments of the public.  Thus, a law blog could be very successful even with low overall traffic so long as it is read by the right audience. 

For law faculty who blog, a critical audience is likely to be other law faculty.  In general, however, there is no way to measure a blog's success among academics, anecdotal evidence aside.  (Some evidence can be obtained by observing number of visits from IP addresses of academic institutions' networks or through direct feedback from faculty.  Even this information, however, does not permit a relative comparison.)  

That, however, has changed. Justia, a company focused on putting up free legal information and community resources online, regularly ranks law blogs, producing a list of the top 200 law blogs by day, week and month.  In addition, Justia lists the top 200 law blogsof all time.  Justia uses its own proprietary system to rank blogs and, like all such systems, has shortfalls.  The system produces some anomalous results.  Some highly popular blogs receive an inexplicably low ranking. Instapundit , for example, is run by Glenn Reynolds at the University of Tennessee and is ranked number 45 (out of some 90 million blogs) by Technorati but does not appear on the Justia all time top 200.

In any event, Justia has just included a top 200 list that counts only visitors who have an IP address that are from .edu networks.  In other words, all of these visitors come from academic institutions.  The ranking, therefore, tells something about the popularity of a blog within the academic community.  Admittedly, the system is not perfect.  An edu IP address could be used by students or staff and many faculty visit sites using from non-acadmic (non-.edu) networks.  Nonetheless, for now, it is as close as we get. 

A spread sheet posted on the DU Corporate Governance web site shows a listing of law faculty blogs based upon hits by all visitors and by only those with an edu IP address.  The list was prepared using the top 200 lists on August 24. 

The comparison produces some very interesting results.  First, unsurprisingly, academics tend to read law blogs sponsored by other academics.  In the top 200 list for all visitors, the first 8 blogs (on August 24) are non-law faculty (Above the Law, New York Supreme Court Criminal Term Library Blog, The Indiana Law Blog, The WSJ Law Blog, Class Action Defense Blog, The FRAUDfiles Blog, How Appealing, and NY Times DealBook).  The first law faculty blog, TaxProf Blog, comes in at #9. 

The reading habits of those with an edu IP address?  The most popular blog?  Abovethelaw, a site that is not sponsored by law faculty but is a self described source of "news and gossip about the profession’s most colorful personalities and powerful institutions"  After that, things get a bit more, shall we say, academic.  Six of the top 10 most popular law blogs among academics are law blogs written by other academics.  Moreover, the top academic blog ranked by the edu crowd is not about tax (TaxProf Blog is the highest ranked law faculty blog among all visitors)  but employment law, withWorkplace Prof Blog the most popular among academics. 

What are the top ten law faculty blogs read most frequently by those with an edu IP address according to Justia? The Workplace Prof Blog (#2), PrawfsBlawg (#3), TaxProfBlog (#4), The Conglomerate (#7), Legal Theory Blog (#9), Religion Clause (#10), Mirror of Justice (#13), Sentencing Law and Policy (#16), and Truth on the Market (#17) (Concurring Opinions is next and is ranked #19 in the top 200 law blogs visited by those with an edu IP address).    

Some blogs have similar rankings in both lists (Religion Clause is ranked 11th by all visitors and 10th by faculty).  On the other hand, there are some large discrepancies, indicating that some blogs appeal primarily to an academic or non-academic audience.  For example, White Collar Crime Prof Blog is ranked 41 by all visitors and 137 by faculty.  ProfessorBainbridge is ranked 129 by all visitors but does not appear on the faculty top 200.  Our very own The Race to the Bottom is ranked 103 in the all visitor list and 151 in the faculty list.   

There are 10 law faculty blogs that do not appear in the top 200 of all visitors but do appear in the faculty top 200.  These are: Dorf on Law, ContractsProf Blog, The Right Coast, Is that Legal, Madisonian.net, TortsProf Blog, Instapundit, Hugh Hewitt's TownHall Blog, The Yin Blog, and Leiter Reports:  A Group Blog.  In other words, these are blogs that have not attracted, relatively speaking, a large general readership but have attracted strong interest from academic readers.   

In a fairly out of character fashion, we at The Race to the Bottom have no particular conclusion to draw from this.  As my piece has indicated (Blogs, Law School Rankings, and TheRacetotheBottom.org), blogs sponsored by law faculty can improve the prominence and reputation of a faculty member and of the home institution of the faculty member.  It is clear, however, that law faculty blogs have different appeal among different groups, some arguably more important than others.  I have provided links to the Justia data.  Additional observations are welcome.