IlliGAL Blogging

Franz Dill's thoughtful comment on my post Why let law profs have all the fun raises key issues regarding the attraction of blogging. I take his second point first:

We have, of course, had web sites since the early 90s, but there is something fresh and interesting about weblogs ... Many people would just not visit web sites on an ongoing basis. A blog, with refreshed content has an immediacy that cannot be matched. It is, of course, content hungry, which is not always easy to feed.

Indeed, part of a blog's attraction is its ease of updating and thus its immediacy. In the terms of economics, blogging reduces the transaction costs of posting, thereby reducing the economic size of the posting unit. To some extent this is merely a continuation of what the web wrought initially in the 90s.

But there is something else at work. The transaction costs of posting to a threaded discussion are comparable to those of posting to a blog, but I find blogging much more attractive than threaded discussions, which I rarely frequent. Threaded discussions are largely free-for-all forums dominated by the principle of the survival of the loudest (or survival of the person with most time on his/her hands). Blogs, on the other hand, allow the publisher to post views and receive comments, yet remain in control of the publication process. The asymmetry of the blogger/commentator relationship in blogging is essential to its growing popularity.

This point can be carried over into the first part of Dill's comment in which he makes a good point regarding public/private blogging:

There is a part of it that is not public, behind corporate firewalls, that continues the discussion.

Indeed, blogging and wikis are being adopted by progressive companies as part of internal communications networks. The use of wikis vs. blogs internally may be driven by the same symmetry/asymmetry conditions noted in the public blogosphere/discussion arenas. How all this will shake out is unclear, but efficiency of posting is a driver behind it all, and it will be interesting to follow how wikis/blogs will be integrated into organizational practice along with the rest of the discourse engine we now all take for granted (email, IM, chat, etc.).