• Endless scrolling and dynamic layout
• nRelate Popular Posts, Related Posts, and Flyout
• W3 Total Cache
• Ads for search visitors only
• Ad block detection
• Bonus: CloudFlare

Some of these are easy—just install a plugin—while some require more advanced knowledge to implement—but all of them will supercharge your WordPress installation.

5. Endless scrolling and dynamic layout

This is a relatively advanced tweak to implement in full.

My blog’s main page automatically arranges itself to fit the visitor’s browser width using jQuery Masonry:

Masonry arranges elements vertically, positioning each element in the next open spot in the grid. The result minimizes vertical gaps between elements of varying height, just like a mason fitting stones in a wall.

Masonry isn’t a WordPress plugin. Instead, I included it by editing my template directly, focusing on the template page (in my case, home.php, since I use Theme Hybrid as a base).

Along with Masonry, I wanted “endless scrolling,” first made famous on many Tumblr blogs, but also a core part of Pinterest. There is a WordPress plugin for this—but I wanted to do it directly—so I edited my theme file directly.

You’ll have to customize this for your own site, but here’s a few useful notes:

1. I use WP-PageNavi to show better paging for all my pages, so that’s what I needed to target with the infinite scroll JavaScript (div.wp-pagenavi).
2. Each block—title, snippet, and thumbnail—is wrapped in the CSS class I call brick, so that Masonry can easily find them.

4. nRelate Popular Posts, Related Posts, and Flyout

This is a simple plugin addition.

These three plugins from nRelate are simple, yet flexible, ways to add popular and related posts to each post, along with a New York Times-style “flyout” that appears to show a related post as you move down the page.

3. W3 Total Cache

This is a simple plugin addition, though it allows complex caching arrangements.

The more you tweak your site, the more you absolutely need to make sure to cache your site. What is caching? Basically, the plugin creates a server-side static HTML (non-PHP) version of your site, then serves that to most visitors instead of generating a dynamic version for every visitor.

There are a number of plugins to do this, but this is my favorite because it’s so full-featured.

2. Ads for search visitors only

This is a moderately complex tweak that requires JavaScript experience.

I only show advertisements in order to pay my hosting costs, not to make a profit. I also blog in a difficult-to-monetize niche—i.e., not about products! Since only those who visit my site ever seem to click on my ads, why not show those ads only to those arriving via search?

Put this at the top of your page somewhere, like your header:

<script type='text/javascript'>
// identify search engine visitors (thanks to scratch99.com for the idea)
var ref = document.referrer;
var se = new Array('/search?', 'search.', '/search/', '.yahoo.', 'google.com/url');
var se_visitor = false;
for (var i = 0; i <= se.length-1; i++) {
  if (ref.indexOf(se[i])!== -1) {
    var expiry = new Date ();
    expiry.setTime(expiry.getTime() + 3600000);
    document.cookie = "se_visitor=1; expires=" + expiry + "; path=/; domain=inpropriapersona.com";
    se_visitor = true;
  }
}
var result = document.cookie.match ( '(^|;) ?se_visitor=([^;]*)(;|$)' );
</script>

Now you have a global JavaScript variable called se_visitor (and a cookie, too, if you want to look for repeat visitors). So when you get to the spot in your page where you want to show an ad, use document.write() to put in the Google AdSense code (or replace with your favorite ad system—don’t forget to replace the Xs below):

<script type='text/javascript'>
if ( se_visitor == true) {
  var adsenseString = '<script type="text/javascript"><! — \n';
  adsenseString += 'google_ad_client = "ca-pub-XXXXX";\n';
  adsenseString += 'google_ad_slot = "XXXXXXX";\n';
  adsenseString += 'google_ad_width = XXX;\n';
  adsenseString += 'google_ad_height = XXX;\n';
  adsenseString += '// — >\n';
  adsenseString += '<\/script>\n';
  adsenseString += "<script type=\"text/javascript\"\n";
  adsenseString += "src=\"http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js\">\n";
  adsenseString += "<\/script>\n";

  document.write(adsenseString);
}
</script>

Now only those who visit you via a search engine will see your ads. Since these are generally the only people who click on most ads, you’re click-through rates will go up—and you’ll avoid annoying your other visitors.

(Hat tip to scratch99.com, which also explains how to use the cookie aspect of this approach to remember those who visit via search.)

1. AdBlock detection

This, too, is moderately complex, and requires JavaScript experience.

As I noted, I do show a limited number of ads. I also personally happen to use ad blocking myself, primarily because of the abuse my eyes would otherwise suffer.

I don’t want to be so hypocritical that I push away others who use an ad blocker, by why show those visitors a block space? I replace my bottom ad (which I show to everyone, not just search visitors) with a prominent Flattr buttom, along with additional social media buttons—and encourage visitors to support me through these means instead.

To do this, I created a JavaScript file called advertisement.js. In it, I put the following code:

document.write('<div id="ad-tester" style="display:none;">an advertisement</div>');

Then in the body of my site, I put this (leveraging jQuery, though you can use another approach):

Ad blockers will not load advertisement.js, and thus no element named ad-tester will ever be created. It’s then easy to check for this using jQuery:

 if( jQuery('#ad-tester').length != 0 ) { // Ads are allowed } else { // No ads } 

I then use jQuery’s replaceWith to put in my alternate “support me” statement instead of the advertisement.

(Hat tip to Erikswan.net for this method.)

Bonus: CloudFlare

This is easy.

I always have to recommend the (free for basic use) CloudFlare service, which provides content acceleration and more. It’s a bit like Amazon’s CloudFront or Akamai’s service, but accessible to any blogger. There’s even a WordPress plugin!

"Ask For Young's Aerated Waters" by Flickr user ninastoessinger. CC BY-SA 2.0.

After running a (horribly unscientific) poll on my law & technology blog for several months, I discovered that less than 15% of people voting found any of the Google-served advertisements to be relevant (not unwanted… irrelevant).

This is a problem.

Google has always claimed their ads are contextual and targeted to the content of your pages. This may once have been true — and may even be true for some people’s sites — but it isn’t true for me. Ads I serve to search-engine visitors are the best targeted, while those that rely solely on page content are the worst. I suspect Google’s increased “personalization” of ads are only going to make this worse, from the perspective of relevance to my content.

I’ve experimented with other services, such as Infolinks and Kontera, but the vast majority of the double-underlines show up under single words with ads that are only marginally related to my page’s content. So, for example, “offer” and “credit” will link to credit-card offers. Even if “law” is underlined, it tends to link to sites on the law of attraction.

I don’t run ads to make a profit. I run ads to pay for hosting, and I ideally want to run ads that provide some value to my visitors. So this is particularly vexing to me, but I think it’s a problem — at the very least — for any site not primarily focused on “monetization.” I don’t want ads to dominate or distract, I want them to add value for everyone. (Crazy, I know.)

To try to address this, I focus Google ads mostly to search-engine visitors, and not others (though I’m always experimenting, of course, if only to keep up with trends). I’ve used services like Linkworth, which at least lets me approve ads manually. I could choose to sell all my own ads directly — but I’m simply too small and too uninterested in marketing — for this to be worthwhile. I’ve found AdBrite and similar services are equally irrelevant to my visitors. Pay-for-posts — even somewhat relevant posts — make no sense for a blog like mine, even if they might be fine for a commercialized blog.

Has anyone else experienced the problem of irrelevance? Any potential solutions? Or are well-targeted, contextual ads simply impossible to achieve?

Image by Jeffrey Keefer via Flickr

There are many (non-exclusive) reasons to blog: money, fame, narcissism, SEO, product placement and advertising, journaling, self-discovery, passion… The specific reasons for blogging are as varied as bloggers themselves, and arguments about whether one should be blogging at all are equally diverse, especially since so many bloggers give up in frustration because their audience is so small. But a small audience is only a problem for certain kinds of blogging, of course, most especially blogging for dollars (or euros, shekels, or pounds).

As someone who does not blog to earn money (I like to pay my hosting fees, but that’s only because I’m a poor grad student), I thought I’d run through how and why I blog, and why I find it a critical part of my “real” work of academic research and writing. (If you are looking for how to make money blogging, there are better sources out there.)

Why I Blog

I blog primarily for three reasons, in increasing order of importance: (1) to give me a visible presence on the Internet for my (potential) colleagues and students to see my work;  (2) to get feedback, not all of it visible on my blog; (3) to capture interesting and potentially fruitful Internet finds (i.e., as part of my research — which is mostly online anyway these days); and (4) as a rough-draft medium that I can draw on when eventually need to actually produce a piece of writing.

(Oh yes, and because I enjoy it.)

Like many personal bloggers, I sometimes use my blog to capture interesting finds. More often, I try to integrate this with my primary purpose, and turn my research immediately into writing by creating short articles about my finds. That way I have ready-made rough-draft material to work from when I go to write. For those who may primarily focus on this purpose, a so-called “tumblelog” like Tumblr or Posterous (both of which I use from time to time) may be the ideal blogging service.

Making myself visible on the Internet may be a form of vanity, but it’s increasingly important to “brand” oneself today. I want colleagues, students, employers, etc. to be able to find me and get insight into my professional persona easily, and I want them to see what I produce. It also helps connect me to various larger communities, including academics, other bloggers, lawyers, and so on. It’s a networking tool that doesn’t need to be awkward or self-aggrandizing.

Feedback is useful, though comments may or may not be. Sometimes this comes in the form of blog comments, sometime in terms of email, and more often it gives me a medium in which to share my drafts with “real-life” colleagues. The more readers you have, of course, the more feedback you might potentially get — but that isn’t my primary purpose, so I don’t care so much about raw numbers of visitors.

How I Blog

My most important reason for blogging (use as a rough-draft medium) has developed into the primary driver of my methodology. So, while I do sometimes simply capture the barest details about new publications or interesting articles, more often I use other tools for that purpose: Google Reader or TBUZZ to Twitter to Delicious via Packrati.us and Pinboard, or Read It Later or Instapaper.

I’ve realized, though, that simply capturing lots of small amounts of information in the blog medium is less useful for me than writing fewer, longer write-ups. Spending more time on each potential source, writing up a more detailed and in-depth analysis or reflection provides me with effective, highly useful material when I need to write an article later.

Image by krisnelson via Flickr

This kind of writing is in-between the quick summaries or reactions of Twitter or a tumblelog, but less detailed, analytic, or proof-read than a true article. These are more like the “reflection” assignments I give my undergraduates, and are intended not so much for consumption by others as they are to capture analytic ideas and details that may help me later. The focus is not on perfection, which makes writing them easier, but I do try to have an audience beyond myself in mind, which vastly increases their reusability.

What does this look like? Try posts like the following — none are perfect, but they’ve all proved useful later:

• Judge Noble Hand hints at the move from property to people
• An argument for the “Inviolability of Telegraphic Correspondence”
• Smallpox inoculation and quarantine in colonial America

Obviously, this approach is not right for everyone, but for anyone who needs to produce written work (that doesn’t need to be secret!), it’s wonderful, practical, and (relatively) easy.

Conclusion

So there you go. I blog mostly so I don’t have to stare at a blank page later, and to a lesser extent so that I can be found online. (Also I like tech.) If you do decide to blog, I highly recommend you think about the why and the how for yourself.

Related articles

• 10 Reasons for a Law Student to Blog (inpropriapersona.com)
• Friday Question: Why do you blog? (worldmomsblog.com)
• Writing For Blogs – Style, Strategy, Voice: Webinar recording now available (kevin.lexblog.com)

That said, here are six of my current favorites:

Around this date in the past… – Widget Edition
By Joan Junyent Tarrida
This little plugin gives you a widget that shows posts from, well, around this date in the past. It’s quite useful to help “bubble up” articles you’ve written previously and that may otherwise be lost in the past.

AutoThumb
By Mathias Geat
AutoThumb incorporates phpThumb into your site in a simple, yet powerful, fashion. It automatically pipes images through phpThumb, resizing them based on the attributes you apply to the img tag. These smaller images are then delivered to browsers, as well as being cached for future redelivery. (The original images can be hosted locally or remotely.)

Free CDN
By Phoenixheart
Free CDN automatically rewrites the URLs in your site (images and more, depending on what you select in the options) so that they are delivered to your visitors via CoralCDN. CoralCDN is a free content-delivery service that, while not necessarily speeding up delivery of content, does reduce the bandwidth and load required by your server. This makes it ideal for limited hosting providers or for hosting your blog at home.

fw-post-image
By Myriam Faulkner
This simple little plugin builds on the thumbnail feature included with WordPress 2.9. Once you have this plugin installed, if you do not explicitly set a thumbnail, WordPress will scan the images you put into your posts and use the first one it finds as the thumbnail (note: it favors local images over remote ones, but supports both).

Simple Facebook Connect
By Otto
This plugin adds a series of smaller plugins, that let you add Facebook Connect features to your blog. Most useful, I think, is the support it adds for visitors to login to your comment system using their Facebook identities.

WP Smush.it
By Dialect
WP Smush.it takes advantage of Yahoo’s Smush.it service to automatically reduce image file sizes and improve performance when you upload images into WordPress.

The future of reading blurs reading and writing. The future of reading is the networking of readers, writers, content, comments, and metadata, all in one continuous-on mash.

via The iPad is the future of the past of books.

Extending this thought into the realm of the university, Jim Milles questions scholars’ desire for Weinberger’s vision of the future:

Apart from a small subset of blogger/scholars, that doesn’t seem to be happening at all.  Perhaps it’s due to the training that most law faculty receive now–not just the J.D., but the long, perfection-oriented dissertation process–but in my experience, law professors and other sociolegal scholars are extremely reluctant (if not phobic) about releasing to the public anything other than a fully fleshed-out article.

via The Future of Reading, or Do Scholars Really Want “Social Scholarship”? « Buffalo Wings and Toasted Ravioli.

As a budding scholar of law and history, I second Milles’ observations. There are, as he points out, some bloggers who discuss their scholarship and work online, in an open fashion, but by far the vast majority of scholars I know and work with do not do this. Some in-progress scholarship makes it into SSRN in a draft form. Even more makes it online once it is actually published, although most of it remains behind subscription walls and is inaccessible except to other scholars (or dedicated readers who seek it out). But neither SSRN nor online journals encourage or facilitate the back-and-forth sharing of Weinberger’s vision of the future of reading as social.

The relatively few scholars who post to blogs or other online systems that might facilitate “social scholarship” tend to post material of a more informal sort, including initial reactions to current events or hot topics of current discussion. Very few blog posts develop research or concepts in detail, and even fewer do so in a fashion that does not react to something current.

In a sense, the social scholarship that does exist tends to be more like a cocktail party than a colloquium or even a conference presentation.

Personally, this tends to be how I blog as well. The material I put online via my blog sometimes informs my larger research projects, but mostly I am focused on snippets of thoughts, initial reactions, and concepts I wish to capture for later.

Partly this may be due to the form of blogging, or of reading online: shorter tends to work better, and hot and trending topics tend to attract more broad interest. (The down side of “crowd sourcing“?)

I like to more fully develop, research, and think about my scholarship before I share it, and when I do share it, I tend to have a different, more specialized audience in mind. My online writing tends to consist of more assertions and fewer citations; my scholarship is the opposite.

Is this just a “natural” consequence of different mediums? Would scholars be better off publishing in a more “social” (technologically social, that is) fashion? Is one way better than the other? And if social reading is the future  —  or should be the future  —  is the iPad a step in the wrong direction?

Reflecting on Avvo‘s Internet marketing conference for lawyers, Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog writes:

I started on the Internet at AOL. I answered people’s injury, medical malpractice, and worker’s comp questions. The more questions I answered, the more work our firm got and the more successful we became. The more I listened to others and the more engaged I became, the more I enjoyed myself and the more people who contacted me to help them.

I discovered that Internet marketing was not all about me. It was about what I, as a lawyer, could do to help other people. Rather than buying cheesy yellow page ads and running expensive TV ads, I could get good legal work by helping people.

via For lawyers is the world really all about Google rankings? : Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

The lesson that good connections with people  —  arising from providing good quality content on a blog, helpful commentary in forums, useful information and replies on Twitter, to name just three examples  —  is the core of effective marketing is often lost.

You might call this “un-marketing” or “non-marketing” to distinguish it from frantic SEO, blaring billboards, or extravagant banner ad purchases. It’s deceptively simple: go out and help people, and clients will find you.

Taking this kind of approach does not mean foregoing an online presence. How can you put yourself out there and be helpful if you don’t join Twitter, don’t blog, and don’t contribute to forums? And once you start seeking out people to help, how can they and others find you later if you aren’t on LinkedIn or don’t have your own Web site?

Whatever you call it, the core message is to be helpful and do good, and the clients and customers will seek you out in return.

As a do-gooder, SEO, ad buys, and similar strategies should be done to be helpful. That is, such strategies should make it easier for people to find you, and for you to be helpful in return. They are secondary strategies, not primary ones.

For a do-gooder, primary strategies involve getting out there and providing utility to others: answering questions, being a resource, advocating positions you believe in, sharing your experiences and knowledge.

Doing good and being helpful isn’t a new marketing strategy. It’s just an old way of showing the world your worth, updated for new mediums. It takes Google’s “don’t be evil” and goes one better: go do good, and the clients will come (just don’t forget to make it easy for them!). It takes “add value” and takes it further: go be helpful!

Has this kind approach worked for you? Have better ideas? Think it’s crazy? Let me know in the comments.

I don’t believe there are any bad intentions at work, but I do think it’s not always clear to people what their obligations are when using Creative Commons licensed images in their blog. (My focus is on the attribution aspect of the licenses, not those pertaining to commercial use, sharing, etc. I am also relying on version 3.0 of the license, but this discussion should be applicable to all the versions.)

So how can we do better?

We can do better by making sure the images we use are properly licensed. For Creative Commons licensed images, this means putting in proper attribution that meets the standards of the license. I plan to do this going forward, and I also plan to spend time going back over images in my old posts to make sure they meet licensing requirements as well.

The Key Provisions in the Creative Commons Licenses

There are two key provisions of all the Creative Commons licenses that are critical for proper use of images in a blog. First, section 4(a) requires that a copy of the license or a link to the license be included with the work. Second, section 4(b) requires that you provide the name of the owner (or who they designate), the title of the image, and a link to the work (but make sure you don’t suggest they are endorsing you).

So What Does this Mean for Bloggers?

As a blogger you should provide the following information along with the image you are using in your article:

• the name (or screen name) of the creator (or who they designate);
• the title of the image, if there is one;
• the specific Creative Commons license and version under which the image is licensed;
• alternatively, if the creator of the work requests you attribute it in a specific way, you should do as they ask.

Ideally, you should link as many of these items to either the original source, or to their canonical location online. While section 4(b) implies that you must provide the URI of the CC license, in practical terms naming the license should be enough (the Creative Commons FAQ says, “it is nice if the license citation links to the license on the CC website”). This is, I think, especially true if you link to the location where the image originates and where the original copyright and license terms are explained (for example, linking to the Flickr page for a CC licensed photo stored on Flickr  —  actually, this is mandatory for Flickr images if the image is hosted by Flickr).

In practical terms, I think the following example is the kind of attribution that is appropriate under the license:  ”Agatha on the porch” by Flickr user Kristopher Nelson, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license. This citation includes (1) the title of the picture, (2) where it comes from, (3) who created it, and (4) what license applies.

Captions with WordPress

In WordPress, you can put this information in as a caption in the popup image add/modify box.

Because the WordPress caption is styled with CSS (via the “wp-caption” class that WordPress puts in), you may make it appear in a variety of creative ways. You can even “filter” the code produced by WordPress if you want the HTML to appear differently.

Captions with HTML & CSS

If you do not use WordPress, you could use HTML and CSS similar to the following (courtesy of the W3C site):

[sourcecode language="html"]
<div class=”figure”>
<p><img src=”eiffel.jpg” width=”136″ height=”200″ alt=”Eiffel tower”></p>
<p>Scale model of the Eiffel tower in Parc Mini-France</p>
</div>
[/sourcecode]

And some CSS:

[sourcecode language="css"]
div.figure {
float: right;
width: 25%;
border: thin silver solid;
margin: 0.5em;
padding: 0.5em;
}
div.figure p {
text-align: center;
font-style: italic;
font-size: smaller;
text-indent: 0;
}
[/sourcecode]

(For more about this, including additional discussion and examples, see Figures & Captions at the W3C site.)

Rollover Image Captions with jQuery

Another approach would be to use jQuery and a plugin such as jCaption or Captify, which will automatically generate sophisticated rollover captions. These look very nice and keep your site design clean, while providing all the required information.

Using the Title Attribute of the Image Tag

If you choose, you may instead put all the information into the title attribute of the <img> tag, along with linking the image to the source page, like this:

[sourcecode lang="html"]
<a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/krisnelson/4213915751/”><img title=”&quot;Agatha on the porch&quot; by Flickr user Kristopher Nelson, used under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 license.” src=”http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2677/4213915751_050a74b704_s.jpg” /></a>
[/sourcecode]

Like jQuery-based approaches, this has the benefit of making the information fully available (although you cannot insert links, so make sure the image itself links to the source page). It also keeps your page design uncluttered. It doesn’t look as nice as the rollover approach, but it is simple to implement on any site.

Use Zemanta

Zemanta allows you to easily select and insert images into your posts (along with related links and more). It takes care of adding appropriate captions and links so you don’t have to. It’s image selection is good, but I like to pick my own images generally, and to style them my way. Nonetheless, it’s an excellent tool that I recommend highly.

Or Just Put it at the End

Finally, you could also add a simple attributional note to the bottom of your posts. This is a straightforward and easy approach, allows complete information and full links.

Conclusions

Creative Commons licensed images are a wonderful resource for bloggers. Use of such images is free and easy  —  provided you follow a few requirements that primarily serve to acknowledge the creator of the work. If you, like me, didn’t always do the best job of this, take some time to go back over your posts and make sure everything is in order. And remember, whether you use CC licensed images, pay for stock photos, use your own, or rely on the public domain, photographers and authors will always like to hear from you if you like their work, so let them know.

So just remember to check to make sure the images you want to use are licensed properly, and that you’re meeting the terms of the license, and enjoy!

More Resources

• Five sources of free images for your blog
• How do I properly attribute a Creative Commons licensed work? – from Creative Commons
• Best Practices for Creative Commons attributions – how to attribute works you reuse under a Creative Commons license
• Creative Commons Search – easily find CC licensed images

As part of this, the TSA issued subpoenas duces tecum (legal orders requiring that documents or information be produced) that sought to compel the two bloggers to reveal their sources. After a public outcry, the TSA “canceled the legal action and apologized for the strong-arm tactics agents used.”

Normally, subpoenas are issued by a court clerk or, more commonly, by attorneys working on a case who issue such subpoenas under the authority of the supervising court. The goal is to compel witnesses to either come to court or produce documents or information to be used in court. Enforcement is not automatic, but is instead sought through the court supervising the case, which has the power to punish someone who refuses to obey a subpoena without sufficient cause (as determined by the court).

The subpoenas (or “subpenas”) in this situation, however, were not issued or supervised directly by a court, according to the text of the document provided by Chris Elliot, one of the targeted bloggers. Instead, they were issued by the TSA under authority granted to it by Congress in 49 U.S.C. 46104. (This authority is similar to that granted to District Attorneys for conducting investigations.) It grants the authority to the TSA to:

subpena witnesses and records related to a matter involved in the hearing or investigation from any place in the United States to the designated place of the hearing or investigation

The law does not grant to the TSA the authority to enforce subpoenas directly. Instead, the TSA must “petition a court of the United States to enforce the subpena.” The court then conducts a hearing, and may impose penalties (including imprisonment).

One can object to subpoenas on a variety of grounds. (Note that one of those grounds is not the Fourth Amendment, since this is not considered a “search” or a “seizure.”) The order may be overly broad or burdensome (although the court may simple require you be reimbursed for your expenses in that case) or may request confidential information protected by privilege (attorney-client privilege, or doctor-patient, for example). Some states protect a journalist’s right to protect an anonymous source  —  but there is no equivalent federal “shield law.”

This is why the TSA felt it could indeed demand information from the bloggers, and why it is very possible they could have succeeded in penalizing the two bloggers in court if they did not turn over the information they had. (Of course, there may have been other arguments that a lawyer experienced in this area could have wielded  —  so if you are subpoenaed and would prefer not to comply, consult an attorney.)

For more on subpoenas generally, and how to respond to them, see: Responding to Subpoenas by the Citizen Media Law Project. The Project also has a good guide to protecting sources and source material more generally. I wrote about this previously in Journalist Shield Laws and Bloggers.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the weekend to the problem of finding good content buried amidst all the noise on the Internet, especially when it comes to blog articles from lesser-known sources. (This is true for readers looking for quality content, but it’s also true for authors seeking readers.) Although I’ve been struggling with this problem for a while, this recent post from Louis Gray really resonated with me:

In essence, the incentives, for the most part, do not tilt in favor of writing unique stories or doing the required research necessary to get a full story, to get quotes from a source, or find data points that back up analysis.

There are going to be pockets of the Web that harbor original ideas, a focus on quality and data, and there are going to be other places where copying, scraping, and shortcuts are going to rule the day.

via louisgray.com: Growing Grumblings on Tech News Don’t Address Incentives.

I run into this problem when, as a researcher, I seek useful analysis on topics I am investigating. Google tends to turn up sources with high “PageRank,” which reflects a certain “wisdom of the crowds” when it comes to breaking stories, but stumbles when looking for more specific content, or insightful analysis. I often have to wade through what Mike Arrington of TechCrunch calls “fast-food content” from content mills of various sorts (including, often, well-known blogs).

As a result, I turn to sources I know (like SSRN or blogs I already know who are not quite on target) and spend inordinate amounts of time painstakingly, manually finding decent sources of information (which usually means big blogs). Usually I miss the odd, insightful posts from “little guy” blogs.

Note that turning up top blogs in niche is not too hard (Alltop is a good place to start). Many of them are quite good (the crowd is good for something), especially for getting the pulse of a niche.

But what happens when you want something beyond the latest and greatest happenings? What about all those little blogs out there that occasionally produce brilliant content, but are never going to compete (and probably aren’t trying to) with TechCrunch (or even louisgray.com)?

Regular journalism (Salon, for example) can be good for this (especially in politics), although the lack of links to sources makes it difficult to use such pieces as launching points for more research. (More academic articles are better for this, but can be long, complex, and specialized.)

Some ideas, thoughts, and sources:

• I encourage well-known bloggers and big blogs to link to lesser-known, but insightful posts on blogs  —  even if the small guy is not an up-and-coming, next-big-thing discovery. (It would be great if journalists could do the same, but since traditional news outlets seem unable to move forward to embrace the Web, I don’t hold out much hope for this.)
• Digg and Reddit can sometimes turn up good content, but this is another case of crowdsourcing not always producing good results. Content that rises tends to fall into certain patterns and appeal to a certain demographic or mindset. Good, but uninteresting-to-the-masses articles tend to get classified with spam.
• StumbleUpon can be better than Reddit or Digg at allowing niche content, but because it tends to feel random, it’s use for specific research is limited  —  I’ve never had much luck searching it for useful content.
• Google (and its competitors) should consider finding a way to “de-rank” content mills in some fashion. (Yes, I know they provide a good deal of revenue via advertising, so perhaps this will never happen.) Meanwhile, Google Blog Search and Google Scholar are useful, if imperfect, tools.
• Web tools like AllTop and PostRank are useful tools, although both tend to highlight top blogs in a niche, not top posts (which is still very useful).
• “Bog rolls” are still useful sources, even if their use is dying off, but again tend to turn up niche blogs, not specific content.
• Academic sources like SSRN, or PubMed, are useful for certain kinds of specific research, but they can be too specialized and too in-depth.

Any other ideas? I’m still looking.

Law school’s pedagogical approach does not necessarily reflect this ultimately practical goal, though, and its focus on the so-called “Socratic method” and on appellate case law is, many argue, an ineffective means of training effective lawyers:

Martha Minow, the new dean of Harvard Law School, where the Langdellian method of teaching from appellate opinions was developed, has called for “another case method” closer to the one used in business and public-policy schools, and consistent with W and L’s approach and Carnegie.

PrawfsBlawg: What’s happening in legal education?.

In contrast, graduate school is eminently suited to its goal of training new academics. We read other academics, write like academics, and teach and grade like the teachers we expect to be. Very disconnected from the “real world,” perhaps, and often overly bound up with theory  —  but still, if one is aiming to work in this area, the training is, in a very real sense, practical.

Law school, though, while pushing the practical, does not teach it. At most, one might argue that it teaches a kind of thinking  —  a very critical kind of thinking  —  but it does not teach students to practice law (nor to teach it, for that matter).

I’m curious to see how my reflections on law school education change as I pursue my PhD  —  I expect I might feel more positive about it as more time passes. We shall see.