Blogs, that is.
A couple of months ago I published a review of Your Witness: Lessons on Cross-Examination and Life From Great Chicago Trial Lawyers, a fascinating collection of stories and advice about cross-examining witnesses, edited by Steven F. Molo and James R. Figliulo.
At the beginning of last month, I received an email from Molo’s publicist:
Hi, I wanted to let you know about Your Witness for 30 Days, a blogging event that will provide you with snippets of wisdom straight from the new book Your Witness: Lessons on Cross-Examination and Life from Great Chicago Trial Lawyers. Over the next month, you can visit http://yourwitness.wordpress.com for your daily dose of legal drama, poignant observations, and hilarious anecdotes from some of the country’s top lawyers.
Sigh. If you actually click through to the site, it’s a WordPress blog with 26 quotes about cross-examination. I haven’t checked, but if memory serves, each of them is pulled from the book…and I’ve already read the book.
This is not a blog. For one thing, a blog should be original content. Steven Molo seems like a smart guy who can write well, so if each of these quotes was followed by some commentary by Molo, I’d probably read it. That would be a blog.
Or at least that would be part of a blog, because a blog should also be a conversation. It appears that Your Witness for 30 Days is trying to have a conversation—comments are enabled—but nobody had anything to say.
Gerry Spence’s blog—called Gerry Spence’s Blog—goes Molo one two better, because he has original content and people are commenting on the posts (he is, after all, Gerry Spence). However, Spence isn’t really blogging in the traditional sense either.
That’s because, like Molo’s blog, it’s not really part of the blogosphere. One of the key facets of blogging that distinguishes it from writing an opinion column is that bloggers link to other bloggers. We like talking about each other. Neither of these blogs has a blogroll, and as far as I can tell, neither one has even one post that links to any other blogger.
There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. If Spence wants to write a free-ranging opinion column, that’s great. A lot of people seem to enjoy reading it. And if Molo (or, let’s be realistic, Molo’s publicist) wants to put up a promotional page for Your Witness, that’s great too. It was an excellant book.
I’m not the blog police. I just wish these people had joined the conversation.
Okay, I will be the blog police about one thing: A while back, when I complained there weren’t any Chicago criminal defense bloggers, I mentioned the blog of defense lawyer Anthony W. Hill, which had nothing but a test message in it. That got me an email from the guy setting up the site for Hill, saying they were testing it and would start blogging soon.
That was three months ago.
Mr. Hill, you either start blogging, or admit you don’t have the guts. That’s right, you heard me.
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