Blog Fight Club

The first rule of Blog Fight Club is know who you're fighting with.

It seems that Kevin O'Keefe, the president and founder of LexBlog, doesn't have much respect for a lawyer who thinks blawg is a really good name for a law blog. And he certainly doesn't know how to deal with an anonymous lawyer. That's a shame, really.

As some of my Blawg Review collaborators know already, I plan to launch another law blog this year. Like my other blog projects, it's not the plan to use my own name in connection with the new project. It's just not about me, and neither is Blawg Review.

It isn't helpful to any of the various unrelated blog projects I'm involved with to have their individual purposes confused by announcing that all these distinctive blogs have the same editor with different pseudonyms. That would foreclose any future opportunity, however remote, to go public with respect to one or another without compromising the anonymity of the others. I like working on a number of blogs with different bloggers, including lawyers, sharing various special interests.

As an admirer of some of the blogs designed by LexBlog, I wasn't at all surprised when one of Kevin O'Keefe's clients was recognized in the recent Blawg Review Awards, earning the Law Firm Blogs Award for coordinating four diverse practice specialty blogs.

In fact, for my next blog project I planned to approach Kevin about working on the web design and hosting the new law blog. Of course, I wouldn't approach him about the new project as the Editor of Blawg Review, but anonymously nonetheless. I wasn't quite sure how he might react to the prospect of working on a blog project with an anonymous client.

We hadn't ever met, but Kevin did seem genuinely pleased when his client's blogs received special recognition in the Blawg Review Awards, and he expressed his pleasure by blogging about it on LexBlog, and so did his client on theirs. It was a link love fest.

Kevin seemed approachable, and I had a question about the PubSub ranking page called The Law List that's not actually his website, but he's the Editor of it. On that page he writes:

Legal professionals including lawyers, law librarians, marketers and IT people have been publishing blogs for over three years. Some lawyers use the term "blawg" when referring to a law blog. Legal blogs allow for the exchange of ideas and collaboration on various areas of the law.

I don't know who runs PubSub, but I thought I knew Kevin well enough to send him an email about how the LinkCounts rankng works.

Date: Jan 4, 2006 3:32 AM
Subject: PubSub - The Law List

Hi Kevin,

I was recommending The Law List to some law bloggers, who indicated they found it very confusing and had pretty much given up on trying to follow it.

For example, what accounts for Real Lawyers Have Blogs showing the 3rd biggest gain of 34 with only a couple of inbound links in the past few days?

Also, Opinio Juris shows the 3rd biggest gain of 34, as well, with only links from 3 sites, one of which is their own feed that provides 93 Inlinks yesterday.

I'm at a loss to explain how this works. Any ideas?

Ed.

Kevin replied simply, "Thanks, who are you?"

And now that I read what he posted that same day on LexBlog about me, I'm not sure if he is going to get back to me about the way The Law List ranking system works. Perhaps Kevin wasn't the right person to ask. I see now that the PubSub site says, "If you have comments or suggestions about LinkCounts, send them to linkcounts@pubsub.com" so it was probably wrong of me even to approach Kevin in the first place. Anyway, live and learn.