A couple weeks ago, Jack Marshall wrote a post criticizing the ethics of George Zimmerman's legal team. Later that same day, California criminal defense lawyer Mary Frances Prevost at California Criminal Lawyer Blog wrote a post about the same subject. Her post used many of the same words. And rather a lot of the same phrases and sentences.

Marshall decided to call her out for plagiarism on Thursday. Given that Prevost's blog is basically marketing her lawfirm, my guess was that Prevost had hired someone to ghost-write her blog, and that person had figured they could just steal Jack's post instead of doing actual work. I figured that she'd probably apologize when she found out.

That's not what happened, according to Jack Marshall in a followup post a few days later. He had emailed Prevost, asking for "an explanation, and failing that, an apology, a retraction, and proper credit." Instead, according to Jack, she responded via Facebook with a message that included this:

I have counseled with one of the country's premiere ethics attorneys. Here's the result: 1) accusing me of a crime is defamation per se and unethical; 2) suggesting that my entire law practice has been based on unethical conduct is defamatory and unethical. I maintained copies both of your email and blog. It is clear that you are hell bent on engaging in systematic harassment and unethical conduct, the likes of which can, and most likely will, develop into a lawsuit unless rescinded forthwith.

It is clear you have little to do in your life besides sent me emails accusing me of crimes, and writing poorly written blog posts accusing me of immoral behavior. Interesting how one making such claims, engages in most egregious conduct himself....But the sheer amount of energy really suggests something more: a lack of work; too much time; off your meds. I suggest you take a look inward and remove your defamatory and unethical blog post regarding me. Indeed, you should come clean on your blog. You've practiced law only two weeks before giving up. Yet, your resume suggests far more experience. I think you should rethink what you've done.

[paragraph breaks added for readability]

Perhaps this is a good aggressive response in the legal arena, but it doesn't go very far in the blogosphere. For all I know, she could very well be right to question Jack Marshall's motives and knowledge of legal ethics, not to mention his sanity, honesty, writing skils, and personal hygiene. Lord knows, I strongly disagree with a lot of what Jack says. But when I quote what he writes, I follow the standard blogger ethic: I give credit and a link. And that highlights what this response is missing: She never addresses the substance of Jack's complaint. She neither admits nor denies the alleged plagiarism.

What really bothers me about Prevost's response, however, is her accusation that Jack is obsessed and has too much time on his hands. For someone who's been running a blog for five years, she really doesn't know much about blogging.

An email and a blog post do not come within a mile of being systematic harassment by blogosphere standards. Jack was just passing by. He says he sent one email, and he'd only written the one post at the time. Prevost could have just ignored him and he'd probably have moved on to something else. Instead, she responded in anger, triggering a second blog post. And now Jack says he filled out a bar complaint.

[Update: Jack says he hasn't filed the bar complaint yet and isn't sure that he needs to. See comments.]

As a criminal defense lawyer, Prevost probably gets the question all the time, "How can you defend those people?" I can almost see my defense lawyer readers flinching as they read that. It's not that they don't have a good answer, it's just that they're really tired of the question, and of the implication that there's something wrong with them for doing what they do.

For bloggers, I think the equivalent question is "Why are you bothering with this?"

I get that a lot. I'll read some news story, and some aspect of it will stick in my brain, and eventually a blog post will come out of it. This is how blogging works. Quite often, we leave the big, obvious stories to the news media and focus our attention on an interesting detail. And for some reason, this upsets people.

They say we're missing the big picture, as if the details couldn't possibly hold an important lesson. They accuse us of bias in picking a subject, as if having a point of view was sufficient to prove us wrong. They tells us we're ignoring the important story, as if life was a television script, and it would be confusing if too many things were happening at once.

This is the weakest possible criticism of a blog post. If you're not interested in what we're writing about, just stop reading. If you actively dislike what we're writing about, then write your own blog. In your own words.

One of my regular blog reads is Ravings of a Feral Genius where Jennifer Abel rants about libertarian topics. Jennifer's a writer by trade, not just by virtue of having a blog, which means she gets paid and published in real publications, the most prominent of which is probably her column in the Guardian.

This last Wednesday, however, Jennifer made this stunning announcement:

If you go to the newsstand and buy the May 2012 issue of Playboy, YOU WILL SEE ME INSIDE! .... no, wait, that came out wrong. Let me try again: if you buy the May 2012 Playboy, you'll find my latest anti-TSA column inside. It's on page 42 (which, as any Douglas Adams fan knows, is the ultimate answer to life, the universe and everything).

Whatever else Playboy is about, they've often attracted quality writers, so that's a pretty cool publication credit for Jennifer. Naturally, I wanted to read it.

That turned out to be harder than I thought. Playboy's website doesn't let you read much of its content without paying, and the May issue isn't even online yet. This meant I would have to go out and buy a printed copy of a magazine. Yeah, I know. Back before the web was big, I used to buy a bunch of magazines, but they were mostly about either computer software or politics, and these days you can find plenty about either of those subjects online. I had no idea where to buy a printed copy of Playboy.

I drove out at lunch time to a nearby magazine shop, but they turned out to have closed a while ago. The next day I tried some nearby convenience stores, but they all apparently stopped selling magazines without my even noticing. Last night I stopped in at Barnes & Nobel, but I could only find a single copy of Playboy, and it wasn't the right issue. I guess all that print-is-dead hype was pretty real.

Finally, I found out that City Newsstand in Evanston had the May issue, so I drove out there today and sent my wife in to get a copy. Score!

The article is in the Playboy Forum section (which is nothing like the Penthouse Forum section). If you're a regular reader of Jennifer's blog, it will be a familiar subject, although as an amateur writer, it's fascinating to see how she's adopted her style to the publication. I don't quite understand what's different, but it feels like there's about 20% less scorn and derision which, given her feelings about the TSA, is pretty amazing. It almost feels a bit (dare I say it?) playful.

Anyway, check it out. (Normally, that would be a link but, you know, dead-tree media.)

I think I first heard of Marc Randazza when one of the other bloggers around here started calling him a "First Amendment Badass," and that's how I always think of him.

I didn't really encounter him, however, until Jon Katz posted this bit about Randazza a few years ago. I took the opportunity to poke fun at Marc in the comments about the absurdist severity of his blog's terms and conditions. I suspect that much of it is unenforecable, and he knows it, but it looks like he had fun writing it. For example, he's got a wonderful blacklist of people who aren't allowed to quote from his blog, including any member of the KKK, Stormfront, or the Nazi party, a bunch of politicians, the American Family Association, and a variety of named persons he finds annoying, include Joe the Plumber.

Marc responded in the comments, poking fun at me for some of the things in my blog's Terms and Conditions. We then exchanged a few emails, in which he gave me a little free legal advice and offered to help me register the Windypundit trademark. (I haven't actually taken him up on that, however, because one or another of us has always been busy. I should probably get around to it.)

Now, he might not like me suggesting that Marc Randazza will help you for free but, well, he just might. For example, Randazza and Ken-at-Popehat recently teamed up to give free help to a science blogger who was being hassled by a quack.

The fun thing is that Marc Randazza doesn't just win cases, he wins them with attitude, as when the copyright trolls at Righthaven were demanding the domain names of everyone they claimed had infringed on their intellectual property. Not only did Randazza beat the crap out of them in court, but his actions forced them to auction off their own domain name.

In case you didn't notice, today is kind of an informal let's-celebrate-Marc Randazza day in the blogosphere. Other celebrants include:

• Marc Randazza: First Amendment Badass.
• Marc Randazza, Hero.
• Marc Randazza would support me, right?
• Righthaven, Liquified
• Marc Randazza: The Mark of Excellence
• Marc Randazza: 1st Amendment Lawyer Exemplar
• Marc Randazza: Super Lawyer, Super Blogger?
• Marc Randazza, First Amendment Lawyer, on the Rush Limbaugh Fiasco
• Marc Randazza: A Sentinel For Free Speech

So Good Luck, Marc Randazza. You're my first call if I get sued for anything I write in my blog!

Jamison Koehler has a post up on his blog offering tips for new bloggers. Although he wrote it specifically for legal bloggers, and some of the examples might not make sense if you don't know the personalities, it's good advice for anyone considering a new blog. If you're thinking you might like to join the conversation, you should check it out.

Naturally, I have a few thoughts on the subject...

Sometimes I write for other bloggers. At the beginning especially, I was intrigued by the back-and-forth among other bloggers I read and sought to participate in the discussion. The problem with this, I have found, is that these entries don't hold up very well over time.  I'll look back at a blog entry I did one or two years ago and wonder what we were ever talking about.  Reading such a blog entry can be like listening in on one side of a telephone conversation.

I say you shouldn't worry about how well your posts will hold up over time. Just because a topic is short-lived doesn't mean it isn't worth your time to think about and write about. However, if you want readers from the distant future to understand what you're saying, make sure to link to other parts of the conversation and quote relevant parts, in case the linked pages go away. It may help to recap a bit. I usually try to do all this in one obvious paragraph, so people already familiar with the context can skip it.

Regarding tip #3, "Find Your Voice," if your writing skills do not extend to consciously creating a style for yourself (as mine do not), or if you're just not sure what your style should be, the best way to find a style is to just keep writing. Eventually, you will adopt certain habits -- certain turns of phrase, certain narrative structures -- and your style will emerge.

There's also some important tension between rule #5, "Do Your Own Thing," and rule #8, "Lurk Before Joining the Conversation," because of the implication that you are lurking so you learn the rules. It's important to keep in mind that while it's helpful to know the rules, you don't have to obey them.

Also, once you start blogging, for God's sake, make sure you really do join the conversation. Link to other bloggers, and talk about the things they talk about. It's really the heart of what makes the blogosphere different from other media.

That's right! When it comes to search engine optimization, I can now claim to be one of the giants. Thanks to this post, Windypundit now owns the #1 and #2 Google search results for the phrase "Obama's left testicle".

I've got to get the word out about Lindsay Beyerstein.

I first encountered Lindsay a few years ago at Magikthise, her original personal blog. (That name sounds like one of the lesser-known Bond girls, but it's actually a geek reference to a character -- a philosopher, your basic working thinker -- in Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.) Lindsay is a liberal, not a libertarian, so I don't always agree with what she has to say, but I like the way she says it. She's smart, she's intellectually honest, and she's a good writer.

Recently, however, I've made the disturbing discovery that Lindsay is the victim of a widespread campaign to wipe her presence off the internet. Surprisingly, the campaign is not the work of the nefarious Koch brothers, as you might expect. It's much more insidious than that. The conspiracy to silence Lindsay is orchestrated by none other than her own publishers!

It all started with Focal Point, Lindsay's brilliantly-named blog at big think. Ever since this new blog came online, the original Magikthise home page has redirected to it. Fortunately, this first attempt was not completely successful, and Lindsay's classic Magikthise posts can still be found at the Magikthise archives.

The next attempt to silence Lindsay was much more effective. It came when the progressive magazine In These Times set her up with a new blog called Duly Noted. It sounds great, doesn't it? Her posts would be appearing alongside those of key progressive figures such as Noam Chomsky. What could possibly be wrong with that?

It was only when I tried to add Duly Noted to my feed reader that I tumbled to their clever plot. You see, the feed link on the Duly Noted home page doesn't link to Lindsay's blog feed at all. Instead, it subscribes me to the main In These Times feed, and the main In These Times feed doesn't include Lindsay's posts. It was a fiendish trick. A nefarious rip-off. A blatant bait-and-switch to hide Lindsay's writing from the world.

Finally, just yesterday I uncovered yet another attempt to suppress Lindsay's voice. She wrote a piece about how and why unemployment is a feminist issue, and it's gong to be the cover story of the Fall 2011 issue of Ms. magazine. As we've seen before, this at first sounds like a terrific career milestone for Lindsay: A chance for her work to appear in the magazine of the feminist movement.

But once again, Lindsay has fallen into trap, as you can see for yourself at the preview page for the next issue of Ms. Lindsay's story "Jobs, Jobs, Jobs" is featured prominently in the image of the magazine's cover, but it doesn't name Lindsay as the author. Next, check out the table of contents below. The article is listed, but Lindsay's name appears nowhere on the page. Most baffling of all, clicking on the name of the article in the table of contents doesn't take you to Lindsay's article.

Admittedly, there may be an alternative explanation. If you explore the Ms. magazine table of contents more thoroughly, you will soon discover a shocking truth: None of the article titles are linked to articles. The entire page is nothing but dead text.

This invites us to consider the possibility that there is no conspiracy to silence Lindsay Beyerstein's promising young progressive voice. Perhaps it's just another case of the sort of tragic ineptitude that results when old media publications like In These Times and Ms. try to make use of that new interweb thing all the kids are talking about.

I'm not sure which would be worse for Lindsay.

Update: Lindsay's Duly Noted blog now has its own proper RSS feed.

About a month ago, although he expressed some doubts about the meaningfulness of blog ranking systems, Jamison Koehler published a list of 26 legal blogs along with their ranks according to the Alexa traffic rank tool. His blog's Alexa rank of 2,011,842 put him at number 12 on the list, just behind me at number 11 with my Alexa rank of 2,011,820.

Koehler took it like a gentleman:

Damn that Mark Draughn: Out of the tens of thousands of website rankings, Windypundit edges me out by a mere 22 places.

Although Alexa is a popular ranking system with advertisers and marketers, I think Jamison is right that these ranking systems are kind of meaningless. To prove it, I applied a few tricks that I'd heard could be used to game Alexa rankings, and then in a comment to Jamison's post, I offered to demonstrate:

I think Alexa is fairly easy to game. Check back in a month to see if I'm right.

That was a month ago today, and here's where everybody stands now:

Rank	Blog	Alexa Rank	Previous Rank	%Change
1	Simple Justice	184,379	1—232,838	20.812%
2	MyShingle	321,305	2—311,844	-3.034%
3	Popehat	528,917	3—578,385	8.553%
4	Austin Criminal Defense Blog	710,520	4—685,552	-3.642%
5	My Law License	831,052	5—981,356	15.316%
6	Windypundit	871,076	11—2,011,820	56.702%
7	Defending People	888,821	6—983,010	9.582%
8	Underdog	1,263,596	7—1,378,706	8.349%
9	Koehler Law	1,342,653	12—2,011,842	33.263%
10	A Public Defender	1,402,114	8—1,480,538	5.297%
11	Norm Pattis	2,489,081	9—1,687,668	-47.486%
12	CrimLaw	2,750,573	14—2,989,677	7.998%
13	Not Guilty	2,838,498	10—1,692,511	-67.709%
14	The Trial Warrior	3,090,681	15—3,193,703	3.226%
15	Probable Cause	3,322,239	13—2,543,238	-30.630%
16	The Defense Rests	4,325,093	16—4,137,986	-4.522%
17	Infamy or Praise	4,367,654	20—6,343,701	31.150%
18	Military Underdog	4,860,028	22—6,954,695	30.119%
19	Gamso - For The Defense	5,372,044	17—5,412,555	0.748%
20	Blonde Justice	5,588,157	21—6,535,407	14.494%
21	Chandler Criminal Defense	5,812,592	18—6,162,411	5.677%
22	Liberty & Justice for Y'all	7,078,121	24—8,261,282	14.322%
23	DA Confidential	7,376,561	23—7,266,259	-1.518%
24	DC Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog	10,855,009	25—8,860,327	-22.513%
25	Chicago Criminal Defense	11,067,409	26—13,712,119	19.287%
26	In Your Defense	17,005,315	19—6,235,707	-172.709%

As you can see, a few people have moved around, but my blog Windypundit was by far the biggest gainer as a percentage of it's original position, jumping 56% or 1,140,744 places to land in the number 6 spot on the blog list. Other people jumped more places, but they both started and ended with Alexa ranks that were at least 2 million below mine, and they did not gain as much on a percentage basis.

I think this proves that I was able to game Alexa fairly easily. I may keep this going for a while longer to see if I can push it any higher.

That's right, from now on, Windypundit will have considerably less libertarian content. No, it's not that I've converted to mainstream politics. It's just that from now on, I'll be posting most of my libertarian rants over at the new Nobody's Business blog.

The original Nobody's Business blog was created by Rogier van Bakel, and named after Peter McWilliams's wonderful book Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do: The Absurdity of Consensual Crimes in a Free Society. Rogier ran it for years, but lately he's been having trouble keeping fresh content on the home page. Meanwhile, I'd been thinking of starting a new multi-author libertarian-ish blog for a while, but first that meant I'd have to find other libertarian-ish authors. One day, Rogier and I got to talking, and we realized there was a solution to both our problems.

Soon thereafter, we roped California criminal defense lawyer Rick Horowitz into our mad scheme. He's still exploring his libertarian urges, but unlike pundits like me, he actually gets out there and takes on the leviathon in its lair on behalf of his clients.

We've got plans to recruit a few more authors to the blog, and we're not loving everything about the new blog design (which is mostly due to my iffy design skills and unfamiliarity with Wordpress), but we went live a few weeks ago and have been posting new stuff pretty regularly. Here's some of the latest:

• From Rogier: Young people these days: selfish, preening monsters
• From me: Chinese prosperity is not necessarily a threat
• From Rick: There's a war for that

So drop on by, check us out, and say hello.

Christie Wilcox writes one of my favorite blogs, Observations of a Nerd, and is hoping to win a $10,000 scholarship for her graduate studies. She's an excellent blogger and scientist. Over the past week she had some great articles on evolution which you should check out.

Bloglines is shutting down. Bummer.

I knew it was coming. They've had the same stupid "Try Bloglines Beta!" banner up for about four years now, and as far as I can tell they haven't released any new features the entire time. That's no recipe for success.

So now I need a replacement. I know I should try Google Reader like everybody else, but last time I tried it, I didn't like it. However, it's probably changed by now.

Anyway, I have a few minimal feature requirements, which I suspect most modern feed readers can meet:

• Organizes feeds into folders.
• Can automatically find feeds when given a blog URL.
• Takes an import of the feed list from Bloglines.
• Allows easy and fast access to the original blog post's web page.

That last one is very important. I use the feed reader to find new posts, but I like to actually read the original posts on the web site, with the style, format, and presentation intended by the blog author.

I'm not too particular about where the feed reader lives. I could use another web site like Bloglines, I could use a Windows application, or I could use a feed reader built into one of the major browsers if any of them are worthwhile.

So, any recommendations?

Scott Greenfield wants to improve his search engine results, so I'm writing this post to improve Scott Greenfield's search engine results. If you want to know why Scott Greenfield would like a better search engine result, you can read the explanation from Scott Greenfield himself.

I stopped by the Fairmont Hotel in downtown Chicago after the InsideCounsel Superconference today and finally met the man, Scott Greenfield, who's a lot friendlier in person than you might think.

The young lady with him is Chicago Twitter sensation Amy Derby. That's probably not how she'd like to be introduced, but I don't know much about her other than that she has almost 5000 Twitter followers and everybody seems to know her. If you follow Amy's tweets, I should say that in real life she's exactly how you think she'd be.

Oh, and all these other people were there too:

From left to right, they're Dave Gulbransen (maybe), some guy (I'm bad at remembering names), Ashley Scheck (I can see her badge in the original image), some woman, a guy, another woman, another guy (somebody please help me), Kashmir Hill from AboveTheLaw.com (badge), another guy, Kevin Thompson from Cyberlaw (maybe), Ed from Blawg Review (or just some guy who's using Ed's identity to get chicks), Molly McDonough from ABA Journal (she gave me her card), and Adrian Dayton, best known for being Adrian Dayton.

Update: Kevin Thompson helped fill the blank spots in my memory. Here's the list: Dave Gulbransen, Chris Schneider, Ashley Scheck, Jane Simon, Jeremy Kissel, Gwynne Monahan, R. David Donoghue, Kashmir Hill, Chris McGeehan, Kevin Thompson, Ed from Blawg Review, Molly McDonough, and Adrian Dayton.

Update: In a comment, Mirriam says "I still mentally draw in Greenfield's mustache." I say, why do it mentally when there's Photoshop? Hope this helps:

A few days ago, Rachel Humphrey Fleet started a blog called The Compelling Brief Blog, which was apparently going to be all about writing legal briefs. Her first post was called "Tweeting the Judge: How Legal Writing is Like Social Media." (For the moment, it's available in the Google cache here.)

The post caught the eye of Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice, who posted a response. For reasons I don't quite understand, he wasn't real happy with some of the things Rachel said, and if you know Scott, you know he made his feelings very clear. The exchange he had with Rachel in the comments wasn't exactly a warm conversation either.

The next day, Scott wrote more about the whole situation, and in the comments, Rachel announced that she didn't have time for all this and so she had deleted her blog. That doesn't seem like an outcome that does anybody any good.

Here's some of what Scott wrote in his second post:

It's now happened a few times in the past few weeks, where I question a post from some newcomer to the blawgosphere and they get upset about it.  The problem is that my reaction to their post is less than adoring.  From their position, less than adoring means I have cruelly maligned their intellect and family.  I've hurt their feelings and they let me know it.

The way Scott sees it, all the social media marketing guru types are telling people how great blogging is and how much fun it is to blog, but they are leaving out an important aspect of the blogosphere:

The choir is busy singing the praises of blawging and social media.  Create a blawg and find happiness and success, goes the refrain.  Write well and they will come.  No one talks about the dark side.

We would have talked about the dark side.  The blawgosphere is a tough place, where your peers may read your ideas and tell you that they are ugly.  Butt ugly.  That's the way the place has operated since its doors opened, and it still functions that way today.

Write something and someone may disagree with you, and do so publicly on their blawg.  Promote yourself and someone may knock you off your marketing pedestal and make you look like a fool.  Or worse.  None of the cheerleaders mention that there is no guarantee that you will find love or adoration online.  None mention that you may well find yourself the butt of a thousand eyeballs if your well-written blawg post is not well-received.

This is a great point. Any class or seminar that purports to explain how to get involved in blogging and/or social media should explain what kinds of reactions to expect and how to deal with them. Blogging can lead to meeting interesting people and making new friends, but it can also lead to meeting scary people and making new enemies. You should plan on handling such encounters when you start to blog.

The interaction with Rachel Humphrey Fleet is not the first time Scott Greenfield's blogging style has disconcerted newcomers, and I'm sure it won't be the last. The outcome, however, was kind of depressing, because Rachel walked away discouraged.

As someone who has successfully left regular comments at Scott's blog without being told to "get off the lawn" too often, I think I can offer 8 pieces of advice to future bloggers who want to survive in the blogosphere even if Scott Greenfield says something mean about them:

(1) Scott is not the meanest guy in the blogosphere. Not by far. The early growth of blogging was fueled by major controversies---the war on terror, the war in Iraq, the government's response to the devastation in New Orleans, and the Bush presidency in general---which resulted in a combative style of discourse that remains to this day. There are people here who will swear at you, there are people here who will refute you sentence by sentence, and there are people here who will swear at you while refuting you sentence by sentence.

(And then there are the mindless partisan hacks and total crazies. In some ways they're a lot worse than folks like Scott, but in other ways they're easier to deal with. I'll explain later.)

This is a good time to make it clear that I'm just using Scott Greenfield as a stand-in for anybody in the blogosphere that posts something critical or says something unkind about you. In the criminal law field alone, you're likely to run across confrontational bloggers like Mark Bennett, Brian Tannebaum, Norm Pattis, or Jamie Spencer. Then there's the vast hoard of non-lawyer bloggers like me, the folks at Reason, Michelle Malkin, Daily Kos, and the teeming masses at the Huffington Post. What I'm saying here applies to everyone in the blogosphere who doesn't like what you have to say.

(But I'll continue to pick on Scott for a while. He can take it.)

(2) Everyone has hot button issues. They're sick and tired of hearing arguments they think are stupid, and they're not going to let it pass. Scott Greenfield's buttons are sleazy lawyer marketing, unprofessionalism, law schools, and something he calls the Slackoisie.

More to the point, this also works the other way around: Every issue you write about, no matter how straightforward and clear it seems to you, is going to be somebody's hot button issue. Blogger Pete Guither is a nice guy, but when someone writes a stupid article supporting the war on drugs, Pete brings the pain, and encourages his readers to pile on as well. When I wrote about police SWAT teams killing an unarmed mother and wounding her infant child in the process, a couple of people left rude comments defending the baby shooters. Apparently criticism of the police was their hot button issue.

If your post pushes someone's buttons, you're going to get an unfriendly response.

(3) If you want your blog to be popular, then it doesn't matter what people are saying about you, as long as they're talking about you. The currency of the blogosphere is the link, and by linking to your blog, Scott is helping to make your blog more visible to potential readers.

Scott's Simple Justice is a big name in legal blogging (Google PageRank 6), and comment spammers are always trying to get links from his blog to their websites in order to beef up their search engine rankings and attract readers. When Scott links to your blog post and calls it stupid, he'e also giving you a valuable boost to your visibility.

(4) For any given issue, many of Scott's readers will disagree with him. When he links to your page and says bad things about what you wrote, chances are he's also sending you people who disagree with him, and who will like what they find at your site. Keep writing, and people who share your values will eventually find you.

(This is also why the partisan hacks and crazies are easier to deal with. A lot of people in the blogosphere recognize them for what they are and will come to the defense of their victims.)

(5) As with everything else in the world, you can blog about it. New bloggers often have trouble coming up with ideas for posts. But when you do write something, and someone criticizes it in a comment or a post on their own blog, that's something else you can write about.

Respond to the criticism. When the badgelickers showed up in the comments to defend the shooting I mentioned above, I got two more posts out of it. When a prosecutor took me to task for defending an alleged cop killer, I posted an explanation of why he was wrong.

Carefully take apart their argument, or point out that they completely missed the point of your post, or thank them for showing you the error of your way, or tear them a new one. Whatever seems right. You've got a topic for a new post.

(6) When responding to criticism in the blogosphere, you will probably not be able to win over your opponent. Not quickly, anyway. You can try once or twice, but don't put too much time into it. It's far more productive to try to win over the reading audience. This should be obvious to lawyers: Criminal defense attorneys aren't trying to convince the prosecutor that he's wrong, they're trying to convince the jury that he's wrong.

(7) You always have the option of completely ignoring Scott. Simple Justice is just another bunch of pages on the web, and it certainly has no power over you.

Does this mean that your critics may go unanswered? Yes, but that doesn't mean you should jump every time they yell. My advice in point 5 above notwithstanding, when you respond to your critics, you are allowing them to set your blogging agenda. Wouldn't you rather set your own agenda?

(8) Filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard famously said that the best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie. Free speech advocates say that the best response to bad speech is good speech. If you don't like the abrasive culture of the blogosphere, then start a better culture. Keep writing your own blog and show us how it should be done.

Back in 2007, author Mark Helprin wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he bemoaned the lack of a permanent copyright. I responded to it, as did rather a lot of other people. In my response, I called part of his argument "pure nonsense, bordering on outright lies."

Apparently, many other people used far harsher language, because Helprin later wrote a book (Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto) in which he spent some of the second chapter complaining about the response:

It is not merely training that has unleashed this keypeck ferocity, but also changes in certain fundamental conditions. In the electronic media's dissolution of barriers---time, space, isolation---and in the vast expansion of received (or, at least, receivable) information, we have become in proportion infinitely smaller. Were you to have lived next door to Ethan Frome in Starkfield, Massachusetts, at the turn of the last century you would have been one of only a few hundred... You would not have felt as if you were merely one in six-and-a-half or seven billion. Now, as mere atoms amidst this mass, the damage we can do is by comparison so much less that rage counts for nothing but a cry to be heard---even if the from a protective and cowardly anonymity. Were anyone to have behaved in such a way...on the real commons of a New England village even as it existed in my youth and young-manhood, he would have been immediately brought up short, if not committed or jailed. In the new "commons," brutishness and barbarism are accepted...

More recently, Scott Greenfield writes:

I recently had an email exchange with a lawprof who felt deeply hurt by things that were written about his ideas.  He informed me that they were too harsh, too rough, too disrespectful.  Ironically, he wasn't referring to things I had written.  He was on the verge of giving up blawging, finding it too vulgar for his sensibilities.

These are not the first and second times I've heard this sort of complaint about the blogosphere. The pattern is pretty common: A person with some degree of fame or authority---an author, an politician, a movie star, or even a law professor---checks what the folks on the internet are saying about them and is shocked to discover that people are saying terrible things.

Sometimes, like Helprin, they try to come up with an explanation as to why people are being so rude. Often this is tied up in their personal agenda so, for example, some feminists conclude that the blogosphere is a boys club that resents women. Similarly, a lot of professional journalists and pundits have concluded that the blogosphere is filled with amateurs that have no standards.

I have a simple explanation of my own for the authors and politicians and pundits who are shocked by the style of the blogosphere: The people you're hearing from have always been out here, and we've always talked that way. The difference---the only difference, I think---is that now you know about it.

People have been discussing Mark Helprin's books for as long as he's been writing, but they've been discussing them in private, in coffee houses and classrooms and book clubs, so he's never heard what they sound like. They sound like the blogosphere.

The same goes for you pundits and politicians out there: Sometimes we think you're stupid, and we say so. We use harsh language and violent imagery. This is how people have always talked about you around the water cooler at work, over dinner at home, and in the barrooms afterward.

The point is, the blogosphere isn't some new rude horror. People have always been this way. All that's changed is that those of you who hold the stage can now hear the hecklers a little better. The heckling itself is no worse than before.

About the only good thing I can think about in the whole Polanski fooforaw is that it gives folks who wouldn't otherwise have had one an easy opportunity to stake out a not particularly morally difficult or brave position against middle-aged guys raping young girls, and in favor of said assholes being given appropriate punishment for it.

Miami lawyer Brian Tannebaum takes a little time out from both what is apparently a very successful legal practice (as well as endless fascinating with moderately expensive wine and an obsession as to which group of men is marginally better at transporting an oblate spheroid constructed of a fragment of inflated swine's epidermis in an arbitrary direction) to point out some obviousnesses; Brian has, from time to time, a keen eye for the obvious.

A lot of folks have been blogging about Polanski.  I'll join in, perhaps, but  . . . I'd like to know a little more, before I start flogging my own keen eye for the obvious.

Which leads to my questions -- which aren't of the hypothetical of "What sort of rope would, in a saner society, be used to execute the 'suspended sentence' that the bastard deserves?" as easy and tempting a target as that might be.

Nah.  Realistically -- and forgetting about what should or shouldn't be done -- what sort of sentence would a guy who doesn't have a plea bargain be likely to face, today in California, for the offense Polanski pleaded guilty to?  (I'm not asking about what somebody who pled out recently would get; the law may have changed in CA in the ensuing decades, and I'm assuming -- although certainly willing to be corrected -- that he'd be sentenced based on what the law was then, as opposed to now.)

Also:  on the flight charge or charges, what would the CA crimes be that he's at least possibly going to be prosecuted for violating by his flight?  And what, should he be charged and convicted, would he likely to face in terms of time for those?

I'm not asking any lawyer to put his law license into the pot for the purposes of satisfying my curiousity, but if anybody -- with or without a law degree -- has any knowledge on the subject that they'd care to share, I'd love to see it in the comments.

 

The AP's Deborah Yao explains:

The Federal Trade Commission will try to regulate blogging for the first time, requiring writers on the Web to clearly disclose any freebies or payments they get from companies for reviewing their products.

The FTC said Monday its commissioners voted 4-0 to approve the final Web guidelines, which had been expected. Violating the rules, which take effect Dec. 1, could bring fines up to $11,000 per violation. Bloggers or advertisers also could face injunctions and be ordered to reimburse consumers for financial losses stemming from inappropriate product reviews.

I've done a few product reviews---mostly books---and I've been thinking about doing more, but that $11,000 fine sounds scary. That's more than all the money I've made off this blog in the entire seven years I've been writing it. I wonder what sort of disclaimer I'll have to include to avoid a disasterous fine?

The commission stopped short of specifying how bloggers must disclose conflicts of interest. Rich Cleland, assistant director of the FTC's advertising practices division, said the disclosure must be "clear and conspicuous," no matter what form it will take.

Aw, come on! What does that mean? Is it enough to say "I got a free copy of this book to review"? Should I boldface it? Put a box around it? When they tell us to obey the rules, it would sure help if they'd actually tell us what the rules are.

The FTC's proposal made many bloggers anxious. They said the scrutiny would make them nervous about posting even innocent comments.

To placate such fears, Cleland said the FTC will more likely go after an advertiser instead of a blogger for violations. The exception would be a blogger who runs a "substantial" operation that violates FTC rules and already received a warning, he said.

So if I review some product and forget to disclose that I got it for free, the best case is that the FTC will go after the advertiser who, having no control over what I disclose, is totally blameless. The worst case is that some FTC bureaucrat will decide my blog is "substantial," which I'm going to guess is not actually defined in the guidelines.

It has always pissed me off how much Congress delegates their legislative authority to regulatory bodies. Rather than spell out the law and the consequences so that we can understand them, Congress all too often simply empowers some agency to work out the rules and the punishments.

Then, as in this case, by not spelling out the details of the required disclosure or the criteria for enforcement, the directors of the regulatory agency punts the decisions about the details into the hands of some future bureaucrats. In the worst case, what a blogger can or cannot do will depend on a series rulings and court cases instead of some clearly defined statute.

Well, that's not quite the worst case, as Patrick at Popehat illustrates:

Define "substantial," in plain English, please.  And also, define how the guidelines will punish those who file frivolous FTC complaints against a blogger for reasons that have nothing to do with advertising. "Hey, this guy sure does criticize the government a lot. I wonder whether he's getting free stuff from Amazon?"

Exactly, although I doubt they'd take on someone like Glenn Reynolds. He's far too mainstream. I think they'll use this as an excuse to attack what they've always attacked: Things that are, by some politicaly useful definition, sinful. If these guidelines go into effect, it won't be very long before they hit sites that review pornography, tobacco, alcohol, and guns.

There's been an interesting discussion of manufactured apparent expertise over at SJ, which appears to have inspired Bennett to weigh in here. 

The spark for the discussion was one of the many blogs that not-quite-promises to generate huge wads of cash for lawyers by gaming social media and them what loves it:

The thought of becoming an "expert" in 6 months may seem impossible to you. But I did it and I'm going to show you how.
But first let me share my story with you a bit because I think it's instructive.

Well, yeah, it was instructive:  I learned that somebody can, with some study and careful choice, become acknowledged by Google as an expert in some subject he may or may not give a damn about in less time than it takes to make a baby.

I mean, seriously -- this guy spent only six months studying this stuff, and then he's an expert?  Sheesh.

So, there I was, last weekend, giving a speech, billed as "Second Amendment Expert Joel Rosenberg".  (The speech is here; you can watch it, if you don't mind downloading a quarter gig -- one of the many things I'm not an expert in is turning a long .MOV video into a shorter one in some other format.)  I think it was a decent speech, and was well-received, by and large, by the crowd.   (And it was actually a lot of good, clean fun quoting Hillary Clinton and Hubert Humphrey to a crowd of conservatives, and then telling them an Eleanor Roosevelt story.  When it comes to issues around rights, there are folks who get it -- and who, alas, don't -- all along the political spectra, which was one of the points that I was trying to make.  Successfully?  I'm the last person to be an expert on that.)

I don't fault the organizers of the event for billing me that way, and that's not just a reluctance to bite the hand that helped me up on to the stage.  I was invited there to talk about the Second Amendment, and it's a matter that I do have some knowledge of, and a fair amount of passion about. And when it comes to gun laws, Lorman thinks I know enough about them to do a CLE class for cops and lawyers on the subject, so maybe that's not unreasonable.

Until I put it into context.  I know real experts on the subject, and have read their writings voraciously, for, well, years.  Professor Joseph Olson, who founded Academics for the Second Amendment -- now, there's an expert.  Eugene Volokh?  Ditto.  Glenn Reynolds?  Yup.  Clayton Cramer, an amateur who has written the definitive study on the racist roots of gun control?  You betcha.  (It's called, perhaps unsurprisingly, "The Racist Roots of Gun Control," and it's worth a read.  In my expert/inexpert/whatever opinion.) 

Me?  In that context, well, not so much.  Yeah, I started studying the Heller opinion about three minutes after it was posted to the Internet -- but it wasn't me who picked up the implications of the problematic paragraph in it, but Scott (it's the last sentence on p. 54):

Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

I studied it; Joe Olson, having been one of the midwives of the modern 2A acadmic movement. helped write one of the amicus briefs, and helped Gura prep for oral argument.  That's an expert.  In that context, if I held myself out as a "Second Amendment Expert," I'm not sure I could do it with a straight face.

But . . . there is that other thing, and I think -- and hope -- it differentiates me in a useful way from the Six Months to Google Expert types:  I know a fair amount about my subject, and can -- at times -- explain stuff* about the issues around the Second Amendment to folks who want to have stuff* about the issues around it explained to them.

Does that make me an "expert"?  I dunno.

Does remind me of an old joke:

A very successful young bowling ball salesmen brings his parents to the marina, one bright Saturday morning, and takes them aboard his new yacht.  The only time he's been to sea was on a Carnival Cruise, but he's bought himself a boat:  it's fifty feet long, and tricked out with all the nautical gear necessary to sail across the Atlantic, and back.  He excuses himself for a moment, and ducks down the companionway, coming back with dressed out with a neat blue blazer, and ascot, and a nifty captain's cap, complete with gold braid and such, on his head.

"Look, Mom and Dad -- I'm a captain!"

The father shakes his head.  "By me, sure, you're a captain.  By your mother, okay, you're a captain, but by a real captain, you're no captain."

I don't mind if others want to call me an expert, not really.  But I'm pretty sure I'm not going to be getting business cards that say, "Joel Rosenberg, Second Amendment Expert."

Or, for that matter, a captain's cap.
 

_______________________
* Technical term.  

One of the recent kerfuffles in the legal blogosphere (or, if you must, the blawgosphere) is about anonymity. On blogs.

Yeah! I know! But they all sound so serious!

Dan Hull started it (this time) with his declaration that What About Clients was now a "Wuss-Free Zone."

Effective July 1, 2009, and absent compelling reasons, this blog will no longer print any comments of anonymous bloggers and commenters.

Nameless blogosphere participants, in our view, are rarely worth anyone's time, thought, or respect. Anonymous writers have already "discounted" themselves. You can discount them, too, without worrying you're missing anything. They are second-class citizens, at best.

Elsewhere, he explains:

Comments from identified humans are easier to swallow because they have more credibility. A reputation--of a real person, who has taken a risk--backs the comment.

Not usually. Sure, if you're Gerry Spence, your representation precedes your blog, but not for the rest of us. I mean, who the hell is Dan Hull? Who the hell is Windypundit? He's the guy who writes the What About Clients blog, and I'm the guy who writes Windypundit. That's all I know about him, and that's all you need to know about me. We're names on a web site.

If I poke around a bit, that site also links to the Hull McGuire website. Of course, now, so does mine. More interestingly, the Hull McGuire web site closes the loop with a page for J. Daniel Hull, and that page claims he's the author of the What About Clients blog.

It sounds like we're making progress, but we're not making a lot of it. All we've proven is that the Hull McGuire site and the What About Clients blog correlate with each other in support of the Dan Hull hypothesis. We still haven't proven that there's a real Dan Hull out there who's behind that identity.

Pretty much the same argument applies for Mark Bennett at Defending People and Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice. The only thing I know for sure about either of them is that they are the people who write those blogs. They could each be written by a team of law students, or they could both be written by Norm Pattis just to punk the blawgosphere. (On the other hand, Brian Tannebaum---as revealed by his Twitter stream---is an obvious artificial intelligence experiment designed to mimic a human Twitterer.)

The same can be said for this blog and my identity. I claim to be Mark Draughn, and three or four of you have even met me, but how do you know that's my real name? Even people who've known me for years and recognize my face can't be positive I'm the author of Windypundit merely from visiting this site. Anyone could use my name and post a few photos of me. You'd have to know me and hear me take credit for Windypundit before you could be sure.

Even then, what would you be sure of? That I'm the guy who you've known for years as Mark Draughn? Fine, but you never asked for my ID---which could be fake anyway---so how do you know that's my real name?

Actually, that last paragraph goes too far and reveals the problem with this kind of thinking: Names just aren't that important. We're not asking the right questions. When it comes to bloggers, the key question is why does their identity matter?

Ultimately, a person's identity comes down to a collection of claims about them. If you sign up at a bulletin board site, they ask you for your email address and send you a confirmation email which you have to click on. This establishes the claim that you are a person who controls that email address. That's not much of a claim, but it proves crucial when you lose your password, because they can just email it to you. (And it proves you're a real person so they can sell your address to spammers.)

When you buy something online with a credit card, they ask for the number, the expiration date, and the secret number on the back. This establishes the claim that you have access to the credit card. Since you could have stolen it from a purse or just copied someone's information, they also ask your for your name and address, which establishes the claim that you know something about the registered card owner. It's not quite the same as proving the claim that you are the card owner, but it's close enough to do hundreds of billions of dollars in online sales every year.

In my case, I make few claims that cannot be checked by reading my blog. I claim no credentials as an economist, so if you want to know whether my economic opinion is worth anything, you'll have to read the rest of my economic writing on my blog and decide for yourself. If I tell you which camera to buy, you'll want to read my other photography writing and look at my pictures and decide for yourself if my advice is of value. It's the same for everything else I write about---politics, civil liberties, movies, music---the blog stands for itself. I am who I appear to be.

That's the case for most bloggers. Their reputation stands or falls on the contents of their blog alone. The name has nothing to do with it. As long as their identity is established with enough integrity to tie them to the contents of their blog---easy enough to do when they sign the blog articles---it doesn't matter what name they use.

In a comment to an earlier post about USLaw.com, someone calling themselves "d." wrote:

There is still a nofollow tag, at least on links to Scott's most recent post (or most recent as of a few minutes ago).... it seemed from comments at SJ that the nofollow tag was an issue in terms of something technical I do not understand.

I'm not a search engine guru, but let me take a shot at explaining.

Search engines such as Google try to estimate the value of a page based on how many other pages link to it. Say you write a blog post about Admiralty Law and Jet Skis, and it's a really great blog post about Admiralty Law and Jet Skis, so lots of other bloggers post message saying "Hey, check out this cool post about Admiralty Law and Jet Skis" followed by a link to your post.

Google will notice all those links and remember them. Then, the next time someone does a Google search for Admiralty Law and Jet Skis, Google will remember your page that talks about Admiralty Law and Jet Skis, and it will remember that your page had a lot of links from other pages that talked about Admiralty Law and Jet Skis.

Google takes all those links as a "vote" for your page, so if you have more inbound links from other high-value pages, Google assumes your page is high-value as well. If Google's link following algorithm decides your page is high-value, it will put your Admiralty Law and Jet Skis page near the top of the result list for any search involving "Admiralty Law and Jet Skis."

Google's estimate of your page's value is crudely summarized by your Google PageRank, although Google supposedly uses more complicated measures internally. (Google doesn't reveal the details of its search algorithms.)

There's a sort of flow to all this. Your site's value is determined by inbound links from other sites, and your outbound links help the value of pages you link to. For the kinds of people who worry about their position in Google search results, this is the most important thing in the world.

For various reasons, Google and other search engines allow you to mark a link as "nofollow", which provides a way for you to tell the search engines that an outbound link on your page is not a vote for the linked page.

For example, comment spammers like to post links to their pages in your blog comments in the hope that Google will find the link and vote up their page rank. You can discourage this by marking all such links "nofollow". Major blogging engines like Blogger do this for you.

It's also what USLaw.com is doing to all the people whose blogs it lists in its directory. They (he?) use "nofollow" on the link, which tells Google not to count the link.

Why would they do that? I'm guessing it's because they want their content to rank as high as possible in search results (so people will visit their site and click on their ads), so they don't want to vote up other pages that have the same content.

The end result is that being listed in USLaw.com---or having your content republished on their web site---does nothing to help your rank at Google. USLaw.com is taking from blawgers, but giving nothing back.

And before you ask, yes, every link to USLaw.com on my site is marked "nofollow".

When Scott Greenfield complained about an outfit called USLaw.com which was republishing his blog articles in their entirety, I didn't think they were doing anything terribly wrong because Scott's blog publishes a syndication feed, and this is what syndication looks like.

Scott disagrees. He doesn't think that's proper use of a feed, and he says my position indicates that I don't think my original content has value. My co-blogger Joel also disagrees with me, but he's less diplomatic: "the SOB is selling my stuff, without my goddamn permission." Since intellectual property lawyer Marc Randazza agrees with both of them, I have to concede. The rules must have changed since the wild-west days when I learned about RSS feeds.

In some ways, my disagreement with Scott and Joel is a culture clash. I do think my original content has value, but I have different ideas about how to exploit that value. Scott is blogging about his profession, and Joel is a professional author, so I think they have more invested in distributing their original content. On the other hand, I'm blogging for fun about stuff outside my area of expertise.

It's like they're Metallica and U2, and I'm just an indy garage band. They're worried about the threat of piracy, but for my purposes, obscurity is the greater threat.

Anyway, USLaw.com has responded to this in a most entertaining way.

Dear Mr. Greenfield,

I was sorry to hear that you are unhappy with the way our web site has made use of your content. We appreciate the hard work you've put into your blog, and we felt our readers would appreciate it as well. In addition, many bloggers feel they benefit from being listed in our directory. Nevertheless, it was not our intent to offend you or make illegitimate use of your content, and in light of your objection, I have removed your blog from our site. I hope that we can pursuade you to reconsider at a later date.

is what *I* would have written.

The folks at USLaw---which may just be a guy calling himself "Gregory Chase"---took an...alternative...approach:

Scott Greenfield - Simply Unjust or Forgetful?

Some of USLaw.com's responses to Scott Greenfield's erroneous accussation have been censored and removed from Simple Justice's comment thread. What follows is an updated and less passionate interim comment.

Scott Greenfield is a prolific and rambunctious law blogger with an admitted yen for controversy (perhaps one that is occasionally greater than his yen for fairness). He represents the best and unfortunately, in this case, the risks of what the law blog community offers (one sided intellectual bullying). We are surprised by his unjust behavior in this particular matter.

Mr. Chase has also been leaving comments of a similar nature on Scott's Simple Justice and here on Windypundit.

So, while trying to build a legal web site---and having some success, judging by the page rank---he's decided to badmouth a top legal blogger and accuse him of censorship because he won't let him post their comments on his blog. Does he realize this makes him look unprofessional? And a little crazy?

When I titled my previous post "The Evil that USLaw.com Does," it was just a tongue-in-cheek title for a post in which I argued that USLaw.com wasn't as bad as Scott thought, but they were still making a few mistakes. After a response like this one, I think I have to reassess the level of evil upward.

(To be fair to USLaw, they also claim to have asked for and recieved permission from Scott to list his blog in their directory. They list my blog too, but I looked through my email and I can't find any requests from them. Make of that what you will.)

Seeing how Mr. Chase has responded, I can't help but think that Scott was responding to more than just the theft of intellectual property. Being a criminal lawyer, he probably encounters psychopathic personalities all the time, and I imagine he picks up the clues pretty quickly when he encounters someone who will be trouble. I think he must have had a Blink-style intuitive flash about just how much craziness was hidden behind the USLaw.com website.

Scott has put up his own post about all this. As is often the case, Joel has posted the best comment:

You know, just the other day I was talking to myself. Jdog, I said -- I call myself that -- it'd be a really smart thing to infringe on the intellectual property -- copyright, trademarks, whatever -- of a smart, prickly guy with a law degree. Maybe he wouldn't notice. If he did, maybe he wouldn't care. If he cared, maybe he wouldn't complain. If he complained, maybe I could bully him into backing down.

Scott Greenfield is pretty far from the aggressive lawyer stereotype you see on TV shows, but you'd have to be nuts to think you can intimidate him like this. I mean, really, Gregory, you're threatening to embarass him with an email? This is a guy who makes a living by telling federal prosecutors to go fuck themselves.

And have you noticed how many other lawyers are dropping in to leave comments? It's like you strapped raw steaks to your body and jumped in the shark tank.

The good news is that most of these guys are criminal lawyers. That's a good thing for you because their job is getting people out of trouble. When you get right down to it, they don't really want to hurt you.

The bad news is that Marc Randazza has also jumped in. He makes his living from these kind of lawsuits---hell, he teaches this stuff---and he clearly enjoys his work. When he says "I think it would be a worthwhile and enjoyable endeavor to sue the living shit out of 'Mr. Chase'", he's speaking as a guy who knows exactly how to do it. (Especially since USLaw.com is republishing his blog as well.)

Understand, when all is said and done, while I have not granted any rights to USLaw.com to re-publishe Windypundit content, it still doesn't really bother me. Of course it doesn't really help me either. In the last 3 months, referrals from USLaw.com have amounted to 0.08% of my traffic. I'm pretty sure I could drum up more interest by scrawling my URL on a few bathroom walls.

Addendum: Events have overtaken me. The USLaw.com site was down last night, and now that it's back, it's only publishing summaries and it's linking to the full articles at the original blogs. That's the right way to be a part of the community rather than just leeching off it.

It's Monday, and over at Simple Justice Scott Greenfield is complaining about marketers. Usually, he complains about people who leave comments on his blog with an SEO-friendly link back to their web site (e.g. "DWI Attorney").

I never really understood why Scott was so vehement about this. Personally, I will delete the totally gratuitous comments (e.g. "You raise some interesting points! This is a great site!"), but if someone leaves a legitimate comment, I don't object to a link back to their site. They've given me content that adds value to my blog, and I'm paying for that content with a backlink. This is how the search-engine-driven blog economy works.

This time, however, Scott is complaining about an outfit called USLaw.com which is republishing all his posts in their entirety.

Again, I'm a bit mystified by Scott's reaction. It's not like USLaw.com is scraping the content off his website. Scott publishes full feeds for Simple Justice---in RSS and Atom, both also advertised as related content in the HTML header---and USLaw.com has picked them up. This is how content syndication works.

I'm not sure if U.S. law recognizes a syndication link as granting a license, but it's common usage in the blogosphere. If Scott doesn't want other people publishing the full articles, he probably shouldn't be offering the full articles in the feed.

I've never objected to people who repost my stuff like that. Sure, they're trying to benefit commercially from my work, but I don't think it hurts me just because it helps them.

For one thing, Windypundit is only technically a commercial enterprise (I make a little scratch off advertising). Mostly, it's about getting my ideas out there where people can see them. If some other web site wants to re-post my ideas, that's okay with me.

For another thing, reposting my content is just another way of advertising my site. I think most people are smart enough to recognize a site like USLaw.com for what it is, and if they accidentally stumble onto something of mine on the site, and they like it, they can follow the link back to Windypundit.

Finally, sites like that give me a little bit of link juice. Search engines treat every link from there to here as a vote for my site.

So, my reaction to a site like USLaw.com is to check if they include me on their list of legal blogs. Having done so, however,I've decided that I don't like them using my content either.

The first problem is that they don't list me in their directory (that I can see), but they've got a page for me, and I show up in search results on their site. In other words, they're using my content to increase the likelihood of a search hit on their site, but they didn't list me in their directory, so people who find their site by other means can't find my blog.

The second problem is how they describe my blog:

This blawgger opines on Illinois statutes, law-related current events, links to content on other legal blawgs he finds interesting. He'll also write the occasional movie review and post his photography.

There's nothing wrong with the way that's written, probably because it's word-for-word the same as the description the American Bar Association's blog directory uses to describe my site. I checked a few other blawgs, and this is not a general pattern for USLaw.com---usually they just use the description in the feed---but I wonder if they stole anything else from the ABA blawg directory.

The third problem is a little more technical. The page that lists my blog includes a link back to my blog, but take a peek at the HTML that implements the link:

Go to <a zclass='snap_preview' rel='nofollow' href='http://www.windypundit.com/' target='blog'>Windypundit</a>

Note that the "rel" attribute is set to "nofollow". That little bit of HTML tells search engines not to follow the link for rating purposes. In other words, even though they're using my content, they've gone to the trouble of making sure the link back to my site doesn't help my search engine ratings. I checked around, and they seem to do this to everybody.

USLaw.com doesn't bother me the way it bothers Scott Greenfield, but he was onto something. These people may not be breaking the rules, but they're damned impolite.

I've just started a new project that I'm really excited about. I'm about to start a 12-part series explaining the best techniques for lawyers to use when cross examining witnesses. Among the topics I'll be addressing:

• Civil Trials and Criminal Trials: What's the Difference?
• How to Sneak Your Theory of the Case Into Your Questions For the State's Witness.
• When to Strenuously Object.
• Three Ways to Make an Expert Witness Look Bad.
• "Can You Handle the Truth?": How To Goad a Witness Into Blurting Out the Truth.

What's that I hear you saying? You think I'm just a blogger, so what could I possibly know about conducting a trial? Well, I figure if lawyers without blogs can teach blogging...

Murray Newman got fired today.

I didn't know it, but Newman was the author of the Life at the Harris County Criminal Justice Center blog. Not being all that interested in Texas politics, I wasn't a super-regular reader, but he writes well and he's been on my Bloglines subscription list for a while now. There was a change of administration at the last election, and in typical political fashion, the purges have begun.

Newman took it like a man:

"I've got a meeting at 2 p.m.," I responded. "Can you fire me earlier?"

He didn't respond.

But when I got back to the Office from lunch, as luck would have it, he was at the elevator bank.

"Can we go ahead and get this sh*t done with now?" I asked him.

Newman is switching to the Criminal Defense Bar. If this was one of those courtroom dramas I love to read, he would end up defending an innocent client being railroaded by his former boss...and he would kick his ass.

In response to the debate over marketing on legal blogs, Gideon at a public defender posted a couple of badges for anti-marketing blawgers to use. They were designed for him by Heather Brandon at urban compass.

Gideon is asking that people not directly link to the badges on his server, but instead download them and host them on their own blog. In a comment, Scott asks for some code to do this. That gave me an idea: I'll host the images and provide the code that links to them.

Here's the code to get Gideon's "No Marketing Zone" badge:

And here's the code to get Gideon's "PD Blog" badge:

 

The original badges on Gideon's site were JPEG images, and they were about 32kb in size. I've converted them to 16-color PNG files that are only 4kb. They look about the same to me, but eat up less bandwidth.

I've been playing around with some of the tools offered by Amazon Web Services, so I'm hosting these badges using the beta of the Amazon CloudFront Content Distribution Network. This means that to allow the badges to load quickly on users' browsers, cached copies of both badges are hosted on servers in Ashburn VA, Dallas/Fort Worth, Los Angeles, Miami, Newark, Palo Alto, Seattle, St. Louis, Amsterdam, Dublin, Frankfurt, London, Asia, Hong Kong, and Tokyo.

I'll be paying Cloudfront about 17 cents per Gigabyte of download, which works out to about 75 cents per million hits to the badge image.

Important Note: These badges link back to this page, so visitors to your site can find out what they're all about and get code for their own badges.

This means, perversely, that these anti-marketing badges are marketing tools for this blog, because people and search engines will find their way here from your blog by way of the badge. If that's not acceptable to you, please feel free to download the badge images and host them however you want.

Update: I forgot to specify that the badges and code in this post are licensed Attribution, Non-Commercial, ShareAlike.

Huh. Bunch of knuckle-dragging link-trollers... They missed one.

Yesterday, Scott Greenfield quoted a Wired article by Paul Boutin that said, in part:

Writing a weblog today isn't the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It's almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

Scott reacted with a call to arms,

Boutin is right about the forces that are undermining the blogosphere.  I've seen them coming and have warned others...and tried to fight them myself.  But Boutin is wrong that the game is over and the blogosphere is dead.  To borrow from Monty Python, we're not dead yet.  But if those of us who inhabit a real blogosphere, the one that Boutin calls a "freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought," don't put up a real fight against the "tsunami of paid bilge," it will eventually drown us.

Fight it on your own blawg.  Don't let the scum get the upper hand out of inertia or some misguided egalitarian belief that even scum should have free rein...The blawgosphere has room for people who have something worthwhile to say, but when it fills up with folks who think it's just free and easy marketing, it will suffocate under the weight of thousands of murdered words.

I'm with Scott Greenfield here. This is not the end of quality blogging (or blawging if you prefer). In fact, I think Scott overstates the threat. I don't think the growth of free and easy marketing sites will hurt the core of quality blogging.

I say that with some confidence because, in a very different context, I've seen all this before.

The modern history of science fiction literature begins in 1977, with the release of the movie Star Wars. It may be hard for some of you younger folks to believe, but before Star Wars there was no such thing as a big-budget science fiction blockbuster. Science fiction movies were poorly produced crap about space monsters, and they weren't profitable because they were popular, they were profitable because they were cheap to make.

(Not that some good ones didn't sneak through---Forbidden Planet, War of the Worlds, Andromeda Strain, Day the Earth Stood Still---but when most people thought science fiction, they didn't think 2001: A Space Odyssey, they thought Godzilla and Attack of the Mushroom People.)

In contrast, pre-Star Wars written science fiction was a literature of ideas---science ideas, engineering ideas, philosophical ideas---and fans loved to discuss those ideas. I remember heated arguments about Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics and thoughtful discussions of Godwin's "The Cold Equations" (a short story still discussed in science fiction circles more than 50 years after its publication).

Star Wars changed everything: Suddenly every movie studio wanted to churn out a few science fiction movies to cash in. Book publishers were paying attention too: Every manuscript in the pile that had a spacecraft in it was suddely given a green light. The science fiction sections at bookstores swelled to three or four or five times their previous size.

A lot of old-time science fiction fans took it badly. Suddenly, all these great ideas were being swallowed up in, well, crap: Hundreds of books about evil space empires, friendly furry creatures, and spacecraft that defied the laws of physics. It was all shallow and sensationalist tales of adventure, and the good stuff fans had been reading for years was gone.

This was both unfair and wrong. It was unfair because a lot of people clearly wanted to read the new stuff. They simply had different tastes. What science fiction's traditional fan base regarded as shallow crap, they regarded as highly entertaining escapism that was well worth their time and money.

(I get into this argument with people about movies. I don't particularly want a movie that makes me think. I think for a living. I think when I'm blogging. I think when I'm reading blogs. If I want to think some more, I'll buy a book. When I go to a movie, I just want to watch stuff blow up.)

Similarly, I suspect that a lot of the people who search for "DUI" are looking for one of the hundreds of lightweight DUI blogs by DUI lawyers, preferably one written by a lawyer in their home town that will tell them what they need to do next about the trouble they got in last night. A treatise on the flaws of DUI law by Scott or Mark or Jon (or me) wouldn't do them much good.

The assertion that all the good science fiction had been replaced by crap was wrong. The good stuff was hidden among all the other books, but it was still there on the shelves. It was just more work to find it. The search costs had gone up.

To help with the search, science fiction magazines expanded their review sections, and over the next few years more science fiction magazines were launched. Geeks had access to Usenet, with newsgroups like rec.arts.sf. Nowadays we have online reviews, Amazon recommendations, bloggers, social networking...and plenty of good science fiction, by whatever your definition.

This is certainly true of the blogosphere---er, blawgosphere---as well. The good bloggers will not "suffocate under the weight of thousands of murdered words" they'll be just fine in there. Readers will just have to work a little harder to dig them up.

They'll have plenty of technology to help, including other fans who take it upon themselves to find and catalog the good stuff. It's only oversimplifying a little bit to say that readers looking for good blogging will be able to find it because a multi-billion dollar company named Google wants it that way.

It's official, I guess. Norm Pattis is blogging no more. Scott Greenfield was way ahead of the pack on this, but I couldn't tell how serious it was. It turns out Norm really does plan to study Greek.

In what I guess is his typical don't-give-a-damn approach, Norm hasn't just stopped blogging, he's taken down his blog. Not only is everything he wrote gone, but he's broken all the links everyone had to his site. I guess he didn't want to keep paying the hosting fees.

'Bye, Norm.

I went to the Agitator meet-up tonight and finally got to meet Radley Balko. I've been reading his stuff for a while, and I really admire the work he did on the Cory Maye case.

The meetup wasn't exactly huge. Only a handful of people showed, and only two of us weren't already friends of Radley's, proving that just because someone is a star in libertarian circles doesn't mean he's going to draw a crowd in the real world.

There might also be another reason a libertarian star like Radley doesn't draw a crowd in Chicago, and it's the subject of one of his upcoming stories. He didn't exactly swear me to secrecy, but I dare not say more.

I didn't want to irritate too many people so I held off on my usual paparazzo-like-frenzy of photography, getting only one picture. Naturally I managed to position myself in front of one of the few reflective objects on the walls and caught my own flash.

That's Radley Balko on the right. The nice-looking couple in the middle are friends from his attempt at law school. The gentleman on the left is the other non-friend who showed up. He's a local blogger with an interesting-sounding music blog that had a name I couldn't possibly forget. I gave him my card, so maybe he'll see this and remind me what it was.

It seems like everybody in my favorite part of the legal blogosphere (or the "blawgosphere" if you insist) is trying to help out Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer Mark Bennet's Google rank by linking to him with helpful link text like "Houston Criminal Defense Lawyer." (You're welcome, Mark.)

Meanwhile, I was checking out my own search statistics, and the number one search bringing visitors to Windypundit is still akednay irteenthay earyay oldway irlsgay thanks to this post.

I wonder if I can repair the damage with some self-referential counter-linking:

• Chicago Pundit
• Thoughtful Commentary
• Skillful Analysis
• Midwestern Charm
• Bringing Sexy Back
• Erudite Author
• Too Cool For School
• Careful Consideration
• Opinionated Badass
• Steaming Piles of Brains

Sigh. It'll work better if the rest of you help...

Update: Way to go Scott Greenfield, not only are you a man among men, but you're also a New York defense lawyer.

...just got some bad news. She's been diagnosed with breast cancer. She worked it into this list of 8 Random Facts about her.

Damn.

Virginia is an author, a speaker, and a past editor of Reason magazine. My thoughts and writing on many issues have been influenced by her strong advocacy of classical liberal values such as freedom, creativity, enterprise, and respect for the desire of people to control their own lives.

Let's all wish her well.

I got an Instalaunch yesterday. Instapundit is one of the oldest and most popular blogs around, and in many ways he's the founding father of the blotosphere. His blog is incredibly popular, and a link from him can give you a lot of traffic. I've heard stories of Instalaunches causing thousands of hits and crashing servers.

I suppose that must happen, but it didn't happen to me. Glenn linked to me from the middle of what may be his largest post ever, and he did it on a Saturday evening. I've received maybe 300 more visits than I normally would. That may just be the weakest instalaunch ever.

I'm grateful for the traffic, but I it didn't make me a star.

On the other hand, I get to change my Instapundit number. Glenn has Instpundit number 0, people Glenn links to get Instapundit number 1, people they link to get Instapundit number 2, and so on. I used to be a 3, but now I'm a 1. It's a sort of progress.

Ken Lammers, one of the most well-known defense attorneys on the web, changes sides.

[Day 1 was here]

On Saturday a few of the Ogmeet 2006 crowd went shooting, but I didn't get any pictures from that. 9-frickin'-am on a Saturday morning is way too damned early for me. By the time I got going, it was way too late.

I did make it to Klas for dinner, though.

It was mostly just dinner and conversation, and not really a picture-taking event. I did get a somewhat nicer picture of Leslie:

And here's Zonker from Thunder and Roses and Tammi from Tammi's World (that's Tammi on the right):

I didn't get to talk to these next two guys much, but here's Biloxi from The Republic of Biloxi and That 1 Guy (a.k.a. Beerbrains Joe) from Drunken Wisdom:

Finally, here's the whole gang. Og, without whom none of this would have been necessary, didn't want his picture taken, so I've only got this shot of his back (in the black shirt).

The photo gallery is here.

Friday was the first day of Ogmeet 2006, a.k.a. the Midwest Blogmeet, put together by Og and Omnibus Driver. Yesterday we just met at the Stonewood Ale House in Schaumberg around 6-ish for drinks and dinner.

Naturally, I took a few pictures.

Here's Leslie, who seems to have done much of the organizational heavy lifting:

And Bruce the Human Pet from Conservative Cat:

Update: Got time to add some more pictures. I'm terrible at matching names and faces. I hope I got these right.

Here's Mr Right of The Right Place and a companion whom I can only assume is Mrs Right:

Here's Grant Crowell from Grantastic Designs. He's not really a blogger, but he's preparing a documentary about Ward Churchill and it doesn't sound like it's going to be very flattering.

(He noticed me taking the picture and was trying to look thoughtful.)

Finally, here's JimmyB from The Conservative UAW Guy:

The rest of the pictures (not many) are in my Ogmeet 2006 gallery. Or just view the slideshow.

(Please link to this post, which has a permalink, rather than directly to the galleries, which could change.)

Update: Day 2 is up.

Carnival of Liberty #50 is up at TuCents.

Previous carnivals:

• Carnival Of Liberty #49 at Liberty Corner

Maybe it's too early to be checking, but I don't think the whole plan to Googlebomb Egypt is working very well. I can't find the Free Alla site in the top 500 responses for "Egypt" on Google. Heck, it's not even in the top 500 responses for "Free Alla".

And when I visit the site now, I get pop-up ads for credit cards and casinos. I'm beginning to wonder if I've been scammed into generating a lot of income for someone...

Anyone out there know what's going on?

About a year ago I dropped Sprint as my mobile phone provider. I was very pissed-off with the way they had treated me, and I posted a message expressing my hurt feelings. Here's how it begins:

I've fucking had it up to my fucking ears with those fucking fuckers at Sprint! Fuckers through and through! Fucker-coated fuckers with fucker centers! Fuck! I fucking hate those fuckers!

I'm happy to report that I've calmed down about it since then. However, my pain and rage apparently resonate with other Sprint customers, because every few months somebody finds that message and leaves a comment.

Almost every comment added to an old posting turns out to be spam of some kind, because spammers assume bloggers don't maintain the old stuff. So the first time it happened I nearly deleted the comment before realizing it was a fellow sufferer under the Sprint boot.

The most recent comment was posted this last Saturday:

You guys just saved my life! I am so pissed off and needed venting bad. I was about to jump from my building out of pure frustration. It all started this afternoon trying to figure out why sprint, aka FUCKERS, sent my account to a damn collection agency when my compulsive wife paid the fucking bill 10 days prior to the due date every month!!!! I cancelled home service with them and that must have pissed them off. I spent 2 hours on the phone today spoke to several nice people from India, sometimes more than one person at a time I kid you not!!! Long story short I am to call back Monday :) What a way to spend one's weekend. The BBB don't even phase this giant asshole called sprint, they have no concept what customer service is nor do they know the defintion of business ethics. I hope they go fucking bankrupt, I will laugh my ass off. Remember what goes around comes around, no matter how big you are.

I hear you brother!

I decided to look into how people were finding that page. It took me about 10 seconds to figure it out: I've got the number two result on Google for the search phrase fucking sprint. I'm also number two for sprint fuckers.

It gets better, if you put the phrases in quotes—telling Google to search for the phrase, not just the words—then I'm number one for both "fucking sprint" and "sprint fuckers".

I think I'm starting to make my mark in this world.

(By the way, the Google ads for these searches yield a bunch of Sprint resellers, an eBay search page for people selling F U C K, and an adult web site that's really just a bunch of links to other adult web sites.)

Blonde Justice is a legal blog run by a public defender who prefers to remain anonymous and thus styles herself after the Elle Woods character played by Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde and Legally Blonde 2.

I worry about people who run anonymous blogs. Not that I distrust their motives or anything like that. I just worry because so many of them aren't very good at keeping it anonymous. Slowly, bit by bit, they give themselves away: Little bits of description about their city, references to events reported in the local news, their age or occupation.

Anonymous legal bloggers are especially vulnerable. If a blogger reveals that he's a 38-year old defense lawyer in a small two-partner firm in Cleveland, it only takes an hour or so of browsing on-line attorney biographies to figure out who the author is. I've figured out a couple of them just out of monkey curiosity. If I knew more about the legal system, I could probably figure out a few more.

I'd also have to be more motivated. Other people are a lot more motivated than I am, and several famous bloggers have been unmasked, such as Washington sex kitten Jessica Cutler, who blogged as Washingtonienne. (Of course, when you're a Senate staffer sleeping with other Senate staffers for money, a lot of people are gonna come looking for you.) More recently, South Knox Bubba unmasked himself before someone else could do it.

It takes a smart person to stay anonymous for a long time.

So how smart is Blonde Justice? Check out her answer to one of those annoying question lists that keep going around:

Four Places You've Been on Vacation

You know, no one really knows where the Simpsons live. Yes, Springfield, but in what state? I've always thought I'd figure it out by where they go on vacation. A family isn't going to say "Yippee! We're going to ____!" and name the state where they live. By process of elimination then, someday we should know where they live. Therefore, I had to geographically anonymized this section. Sorry.

On a sailboat
On a cruise ship
Tropical Islands
Central America

Blonde Justice is that smart. And that paranoid. I gotta admire that.

In the half-decade or so that blogging has been taking off on the World Wide Web, bloggers have envied the mainstream media for its power and influence while at the same time excoriating the mainstream media for its arrogance.

The bloggers have been making continuous progress catching up on power and influence over the last few years. Now they take a big step toward catching up on the arrogance. On Friday, several major bloggers issued a joint statement:

We are bloggers with boatloads of opinions, and none of us come close to agreeing with any other one of us all of the time. But we do agree on this: The new leadership in the House of Representatives needs to be thoroughly and transparently free of the taint of the Jack Abramoff scandals, and beyond that, of undue influence of K Street.

We are not naive about lobbying, and we know it can and has in fact advanced crucial issues and has often served to inform rather than simply influence Members.

But we are certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege. We hope the Hastert-Dreier effort leads to sweeping reforms including the end of subsidized travel and other obvious influence operations. Just as importantly, we call for major changes to increase openness, transparency and accountability in Congressional operations and in the appropriations process.

As for the Republican leadership elections, we hope to see more candidates who will support these goals, and we therefore welcome the entry of Congressman John Shadegg to the race for Majority Leader. We hope every Congressman who is committed to ethical and transparent conduct supports a reform agenda and a reform candidate. And we hope all would-be members of the leadership make themselves available to new media to answer questions now and on a regular basis in the future.

Signed,

N.Z. Bear, The Truth Laid Bear
Hugh Hewitt, HughHewitt.com
Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com
Kevin Aylward, Wizbang!
La Shawn Barber, La Shawn Barber's Corner
Lorie Byrd / DJ Drummond , Polipundit
Beth Cleaver, MY Vast Right Wing Conspiracy
Jeff Goldstein, Protein Wisdom
Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
John Hawkins, Right Wing News
John Hinderaker, Power Line
Jon Henke / McQ / Dale Franks, QandO
James Joyner, Outside The Beltway
Mike Krempasky, Redstate.org
Michelle Malkin, MichelleMalkin.com
Ed Morrissey, Captain's Quarters
Scott Ott, Scrappleface
The Anchoress, The Anchoress
John Donovan / Bill Tuttle, Castle Argghhh!!!

You know, blogging is an ego trip. Every one of us has to feel self-important enough to believe other people will care what we think. It's just part of blogging.

But getting together and crafting a joint statement of advice to Congressional leadership claiming to be "certain that the public is disgusted with excess and with privilege" shows a level of pomposity that these same bloggers would ruthlessly ridicule if the mainstream media did it.

(plus they left me out)