Dennis Kennedy's 2010 Blawggies

Few have been as close a watcher of law blogging developments for so long as Dennis Kennedy has. His first Blawggie awards was published in December 2004. Over the years, awards categories have changed to reflect the changing landscape of the law blogosphere but law librarian blogs have been recognized, oftentimes, as in this year, in the Best Legal Blog Category. In 2004, law librarian blogs were runner-up to group blogs in the Best Legal Blog Trends.

The most important trend in law-related blogging category has always been a very interesting feature of Kennedy's annual Blawggies posts. This year the winner is Social Media, the Mobile Platform and Personal Portals. About this trend Kennedy writes

Social media has had a huge impact on the frequency and types of posting blawggers do. If you take my blog as an example, my frequency of blogging might be the lowest ever (about once a week or so) and many of the things I probably would have blogged about in the past now appear as links on DennisKennedy.Microblog, my blog’s Twitter account.

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It used to be that websites and blogs made a great effort to drive people back to the website or blog and capture the reader there. The website or blog was the one central “home base” (as Chris Brogan and others call it). Now, I see our web presence as much more distributed and our audience finding us in a variety of unrelated ways. The key thing is not to “drive and capture,” but to recognize the different routes people take and the different audiences, and make each location a “personal portal” that lets your audience easily find and get to your other presences, if they choose to do so. This means more repurposing, more linking and a more open and fluid web presence than in the past. It’s challenging, but it’s exciting. It will be interesting to see how much longer blogging awards like the Blawggies still make sense in the dynamic world of social media, apps and new developments.

About the impact of other social media web communication avenues on law blogging, Kennedy writes:

As I predicted in my 2009 Blawggies post, the biggest trend in blawgging in 2010 is the continuing movement of blawggers into social media. It’s definitely decreased the frequency of blog posting by many blawggers and changed what gets written about on a blog as opposed to distributed via social media. As I considered the 2010 Blawggie awards, I was surprised by how many well-known blawgs were not very active this past year because the authors were using social media as their primary daily outlet.

Check out Kennedy's 2010 Blawggie Award Categories and Winners ("[T]his seventh edition of the awards makes them the longest running annual awards list for law-related blogs selected by a lawyer named Dennis Kennedy living in St. Louis, Missouri. It’s difficult to keep a blog going for that length of time, let alone maintain an ongoing feature on blog for so long. I’ve enjoyed seeing how what once was just a crazy idea has turned into a bit of an institution in the world of law-related blogging.") [JH]