Blogiversary: How Has the Blog Changed Over the Past 20 Years? (Part 2 of 10)

I’m continuing my celebration of this blog’s 20th blogiversary. In this post, I’ll reflect on some ways the blog has changed over the decades.

Longer Posts. When I first started, the paradigmatic blog post in the blogosphere was a quick and short thought on current events. Reflecting that ethos, my early blog posts were often quite short–sometimes just a paragraph or two.

Over the years, my blog posts have gotten longer. I still do short posts occasionally, especially when I’m blogging a relatively minor decision. However, my posts routinely run 1,000+ words and sometimes go over 3,000 words. I estimate that my posts average about 700 words each, a number that is likely considerably higher than the average length from posts in the blog’s first year.

The Primacy of Covering Court Decisions. Blogging court decisions is the heart of this blog, as it’s been from day 1. I’ve gotten somewhat efficient at doing it, having practiced the skill thousands of times, though I sometimes spend 10+ hours blogging a complex major decision.

When I first started, the blog had many other types of posts: commenting on news items beyond court opinions (such as industry news), reporting on case filings other than court opinions, coverage of academic articles, recaps of conferences, personal news, and more. I still do all of this, but less than I used to.

Some of that reflects how time-consuming those blog posts can be to write. For example, a few years ago, I blogged several proposed bills, but statutory analysis is extraordinarily time-consuming and very difficult to time correctly (legislation gets amended through the legislative cycle, necessitating all-new analyses). Post-conference recaps were another time-consuming effort for a less-than-clear benefit.

Death of the Quick Links. When I first started the blog, I didn’t have any social media accounts at all. I got my first Facebook and Twitter accounts a year or two after the blog started. So before social media, my blog was my only venue to post short news items of interest.

Over time, I redirected those news items to social media. Twitter was a great complement to full blog posts. If I could fit the news item in 140 characters, it went to Twitter; if it needed more space, then I would consider blogging it.

This two-tier approach to blogging left a gap: some items needed more than 140 characters but didn’t warrant a full blog post. I filled that gap with a blog format I called “Quick Links,” which were compilations of in-betweener news items. Initially, I cranked out the Quick Links posts monthly; then I did the posts quarterly but organized the links into several topically themed posts. For what seemed like glorified social media posts, the Quick Links posts were surprisingly popular with readers.

What seemed like a good idea at the time devolved into a burden. Preparing the Quick Links took several hours each period–a big enough slug of time that sometimes I just didn’t have the time window to prepare them. That meant I eventually started pushing the periodicity out, first to biannually and eventually annually. But the annual posts took even more time to prepare, and end-of-year is a busy time for me as a professor. Plus, if they were compilations of newsy items, the news value surely didn’t benefit from this slow pace. I finally asked myself: what am I doing?

As a result, I have given up on Quick Links together. I still use the same two-tier blogging approach I have for 15+ years, but I have stopped covering the material that fell into the gap. If an item relates to a prior blog post, I’m now likely to add it to the prior blog post as an update. This isn’t ideal because you’ll almost never seen those updates, but at least I don’t have a backlog and the associated cognitive burden.

[A reminder: my social media posts are an integral extension of the blog. Find me at Bluesky.]

Less Engagement With Other Bloggers. If you look back at my early posts, you’ll see that I often quoted or cited other bloggers and included a bibliography of other bloggers who were addressing the same topic. Remember, without social media, all of that dialogue took place on blogs.

Over time, social media took over that conversation, and many bloggers stopped blogging. It’s now fairly common that I am the only blogger writing a rapid-response blog post on a new court opinion, when a similar opinion in 2005 would have been gang-tackled by a half-dozen or more bloggers in a dialogue with each other.

Meanwhile, when a really hot court decision comes out, I spend hours working up my multi-thousand word blog post while, in the interim, others are posting reaction social media posts as they read it and doing multi-post threads with their commentary. That particular format doesn’t work for me–I need to read the opinion in entirety before I can identify what I think it significant, I’ve never been a fan of multi-post threads (call me old-school), and I think many of the immediate “hot takes” are unhelpful and sometimes misleading. The net effect is that the conversation runs wild on social media, well-informed or not, while I’m toiling on my mondo post. I still think there’s a market for the well-composed comprehensive take via a blog post, but the reality is that most of the energy has shifted into the instant social media “hot takes” and that leaves less interest in the long-form commentary. I don’t plan to change my approach, but my posts get less attention because the game around them has changed.

Traffic Declines. I’m not sure when the blog hit its traffic peak, but we’re clearly past that point now. My hypotheses about the reasons for the decline in blog traffic include:

• diminished blogger referral traffic as other bloggers have turned off their blogs.
• the noticeable decline in Google’s search engine quality. I often can’t find my own posts in Google’s search results even when I use very precise search queries. I assume my visibility in the index has dropped precipitously, so I get a smaller volume of search referrals than I used to.
• the implosion of Twitter. I relied heavily on Twitter for public visibility, but Twitter made two changes that sapped my blog of referrals. First, Twitter kept amping up algorithmic sorting of tweets, and my tweets didn’t play the algorithmic game successfully. Even before Musk took over Twitter, my tweets would routinely get minimal views because the algorithm didn’t love them. Second, Musk’s takeover of Twitter depopulated that service and triggered an exodus to other social media. My readers left Twitter and I stopped posting there, but I have not reaggregated that audience at other social media.
• I’ve never been a fad-chaser. I’m an old-guard Internet Law expert from the 1990s, and I keep covering the same topics rather than prioritizing the latest “hot thing.” But old-school Internet Law topics have been eclipsed in interest by some new topics, especially AI. I haven’t modernized my portfolio of coverage to reflect these changes.

I hope none of these sound like complaints. I don’t really care about traffic numbers (otherwise, I would change my approaches!). As I’ve often joked, I anticipated having a total of three readers when I started my blog–the two Marquette students who encouraged me plus my mom (no longer with us, and she never did read the blog anyway)–and I would keep doing exactly what I’m doing if that was my entire readership. But as I think about the blog lifecycles, I’ve been around long enough to see the rise of blogs, the rise of social media, the demise of blogs, the implosion of social media, and where we are now, the fragmentation of social media with dispersed audiences.

The Blog Spends More Time Discussing Politics and Partisanship.  As I have indicated before, I am not a Democrat or Republican. I am registered “decline-to-state,” and I loathe partisan food fights. If I could blog without ever discussing anyone’s partisan affiliation, I’d be happier.

In the early days of the blog, partisan topics came up rarely. It was a more innocent time, when both parties still generally had good feelings towards the Internet and were not looking to ruin it. And when we did see anti-Internet freakouts, that was equally likely to come from Democrats or Republicans. For example, a lot of the initial knee-jerk anti-Gmail regulatory freakouts came from Democrats; and one of the blog’s earliest targets was Rep. Stephen Urquhart, a Republican Utah legislator who pushed a series of horrible policy ideas in the mid-2000s. (I honestly had no idea Urquhart was a Republican until I just looked it up now–it was never important to the blog’s coverage).

Since the Trump era, the blog has spent far more time on partisan issues. I still hate partisan politics, but I cannot ignore how Trump and MAGA pose existential threats to the Internet.

Trump himself has been cartoonish in his handling of Internet regulation. For me, his signature move was vetoing the 2020 bill providing raises for military personnel because that bill didn’t repeal Section 230. No, it made no sense, and yes, we came perilously close to blowing up the modern Internet for absolutely no reason.

Trump and MAGA have unleashed countless other threats to the Internet. The “red states” have led the way with censorial laws like the Florida and Texas social media censorship laws (both knee-jerk reactions to Trump’s deplatforming after his attempted insurrection) and near-verbatim reduxes of the CDA/COPA with the hope that maybe now those laws have magically become constitutional. Overall, the Republicans seem to more frequently push bills designed solely to trigger the libs on culture war issues or boost their team at the expense of their rivals, and this kind of partisan gamesmanship jeopardizes everything we love about the Internet.

I reiterate that the Democrats aren’t blameless. I hold them responsible for (among other things) the TikTok ban bill and California’s never-ending string of awful Internet censorship laws, including the CCPA/CPRA, the AADC, and SB 976. The reality is that the Internet has no friends in high places on either side of the aisle.

A reminder to all politicians: the Internet isn’t a political prop to be tossed around carelessly. Any politician who threatens the Internet’s core functions just to score political points or gain political leverage on other topics shows an enormous disrespect for what their constituents actually want.

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Coverage of the 20 year blogiversary:

Part 1: Celebrating the Blog’s 20th Blogiversary
Part 2: How Has the Blog Changed Over the Past 20 Years?
Part 3: Who Reads the Blog, and Why?
Part 4: Readers’ Favorite Topics, Posts, and Memes
Part 5: How the Blog Helps Readers
Part 6: Jess Miers Reflects on the Blogiversary
Part 7: Ethan Ackerman Reflects on the Blogiversary
Part 8: Guest Bloggers of the Technology & Marketing Law Blog
Part 9: How Information Consumption Habits Have Changed Over the Years
Part 10: What Will This Blog Look Like in 10 Years?

Coverage of the 10 year blogiversary:

Part 1: Happy 10th Blogiversary!
Part 2: The Blog’s Impact
Part 3: The Blogosphere’s Evolution
Part 4: Changes in Internet and IP Law
Bonus: A Video Interview About the Blog