Solicitors Online Blog

Grant Griffiths' 31 day 'butt kicking" course for bloggers

American lawyer and blogger Grant Griffiths is going to be running a campaign during October (2009) which he is calling "31 Days to Kick Your Blog in the Butt". 

Every day he will be posting to his blog and emailing out to those who have signed up:

- A discussion or teaching component 

- A task/homework/assignment component 

The idea being to encourage flagging bloggers by getting them to learn by doing stuff, and, to use the words of Mr Griffiths himself, to "kick your blog in the butt so it is actually working for you". It sounds fun. You can read more and sign up here.

Blogging – Part 1

As most people will know, a blog is a sort of online diary – the name is a shorted form of weblog. The blog owner will blog ‘posts’ which will appear in a list with the most recent at the top.

Blogs have been around for some time, and most people are familiar with them. There are hundreds of millions of them around, ranging from blogs with just a few posts which no-one wants to read by someone no-one has ever heard of, to highly influential blogs read by millions every day.

Most newspapers will have at least one blog, and some will have many, kept by their journalists on particular topics, for example The Times and The Guardian. Perhaps the most popular of these is the American Huffington Post blog. Many TV channels will also have blogs, for example Robert Peston of the BBC and Jon Snow of Channel Four.

Many businesses now have blogs. Some will be anodyne company speak which will be largely ignored, others will be interesting and worth reading. You may have a blog for your firm. Many solicitors firms do now. I have written the Landlord Law Blog for my business since February 2006.

Many of the best known blogs are anonymous. Most of you will have heard of the blog by Belle de Jour, a London call girl. This became so famous that it was published as a book, and there has been a TV show based on it starring Billie Piper. Another anonymous blog recently in the news was that written by Night Jack, a policeman who told it like it was, which was closed down after The Times discovered and published his identity (after a court case seeking to preserve his identity failed).

There are many anonymous legal blogs, for example Nearly Legal which covers housing law cases, Geeklawyer an intellectural property barrister, and Baby Barista who blogs for The Times. Law Blogs are sometimes called Blawgs, for obvious reasons.

Although there are many more lawyers blogging now, we have come fairly late to the blogging scene. When I started there were just a handful, mainly John Bloches excellent Family Lore blog, The Charon QC blog, and Geeklawyer. There are far more legal bloggers (as you would expect) in America. Two well known ones are Susan Cartier Liebel's Solo Practice blog (and since I first knew her, her consultancy for sole practitioners has turned into a University) and Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

But why write a blog? We will look at that next.