Blogging for fun and promotion

(via Legal Theory Blog). I have been reading some of the reports by Lawrence Solum from the symposium Bloggership: How Blogs are Transforming Legal Scholarship from Harvard's Berkman Centre.

It seems like this was a very successful event, with an impressive arrange of thought-provoking papers about academy, lawyering and blogs. I have been reading Solum's excellent paper Blogging and the Transformation of Legal Scholarship, and I thoroughly agree that blogging has the potential to change the way in which legal research is done. American academics are definitely more open to the interaction between Google Scholar, blogs and SSRN to bring about a much more vibrant and updated type of scholarship. Here in the UK, legal and academic blogs seem to be the realm of a determined minority, while on the other side of the Atlantic you cannot be a cyber-professor if you don't have a blog.

Another paper that caught my eye is Blogging While Untenured and Other Extreme Sports by Christine Hurt and Tung Yin. Loads of fun, but it has a serious point. Blogging is a worthwhile effort for researchers, particularly if you blog in the same area in which you are researching. It has several advantages, such as finding out the latest legal developments as they take place, but it also serves as a networking tool. Having had some few invitations to give talks based on people stumbling this blog, I have to agree about the possibilities.

However, how many opportunities have I missed precisely because somebody read my blog?