Law X.0

Law Of The Blog By a Layperson for Laypersons

Law Of The Blog: A Blogger's Guide to Copyright, Defamation, Trademark and Other Legal Issues is a 72 page $9.95 self-published eBook written by Nicholas Carroll. Carroll writes that he is not a lawyer, stating "my legal experience comes through business (publishing, real estate, manufacturing, services, etc.), writing contracts, and occasional litigation." About his book he says:

If you're crazed about fine detail, you probably don't, because this is written for the lay reader, and I am not about to slam them with Latin. If you're one of the many lawyers who hates reading statute and case law, then think of Law of The Blog as a painless overview of the legal landscape of blogging and general online law. The final manuscript was sliced and diced – but never skewered – by lawyers in libel, personal injury, child rights, criminal, intellectual property, etc. Despite that there is no reliance, of course. (Or equitable estoppel.)

Table of Contents | Ordering Information

A First? Law School Website Features Quote from Blog

The University of Chicago Law School's stunning new website front page features what I believe is a first, a quote from a law prof blog post. Here's the quote:

A firm that pays less cash, and more perks and deferred compensation, retains a mighty stick with which to hit executives who cheat. -- Todd Henderson, University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog, October 3, 2006

Go to the website and hit the refresh button until it appears. [JH]

OEDb Ranks Top 25 Librarian Bloggers

Online Education Database has released Top 25 Librarian Bloggers. In answering the question, "which librarian bloggers have the biggest reach?", OEDb writes "our goal was to show — using objective data from reliable sources — which blogs are the most popular, according to visitor traffic and site backlinks. To this end, we used data for these four metrics to calculate the rankings: (1)Google PageRank, (2) Alexa Rank, (3) Technorati Authority, and (4) Bloglines Subscribers." It would be interesting to apply the same metrics to blogs by law professors and attorneys. Any volunteers?

Our sister blog, Law Librarian Blog, ranked fifth in the overall study and is the most popular law librarian blog according to the report. Thanks readers!

Here's the top five:

1. librarian.net
2. The Shifted Librarian
3-tied. LibrarianInBlack and Free Range Librarian
5. Law Librarian Blog

[JH]

Wikirage

Wikirage lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitor this social phenomenon. [JH]

Mining the Blogosphere: Age, Gender and the Varieties of Self–expression

Shlomo Argamon, Moshe Koppel, James W. Pennebaker and Jonathan Schler's Mining the Blogosphere: Age, Gender and the Varieties of Self–expression was published in the September 2007 issue of First Monday. Here's the abstract:

The growth of the blogosphere offers an unprecedented opportunity to study language and how people use it on a large scale. We present an analysis of over 140 million words of English text drawn from the blogosphere, exploring if and how age and gender affect writing style and topic. Our primary result is that a number of stylistic and content–based indicators are significantly affected by both age and gender, and that the main difference between older and younger bloggers, and between male and female bloggers, lies in the extent to which their discourse is outer– or inner–directed. In fact, the linguistic factors that increase in use with age are just those used more by males of any age, and conversely, those that decrease in use with age are those used more by females of any age.