One of the growing trends I’ve been observing in the blogosphere lately has been the arrival of social networking and Web 2.0 sites that all seem to have one thing in common: they’re all designed to encourage you to store your content on THEIR networks, rather than on your own site. Got photos you want to show the world? Upload them to Flickr. For videos, there’s YouTube. For music, there’s Last.FM, iLike, Garageband and so on. For those who like to write, network or blog, we have MySpace, LiveJournal, Xanga, Vox and blah blah blah, ad infinitum. And then of course we have the specialty sites like Twitter and Tumblr and blah blah blah ad infinitum. Good grief. While I admit that all these sites have their uses respectively, it also means you’re investing a whole lotta time and resources on just about everything except your own blog. People may not even come to your site anymore because your content is now available elsewhere, whether on a MySpace server or a YouTube channel or God only knows where else you’ve been going. Web 2.0 then has not only stolen your time and content, it’s taken your traffic too, and with it a chance for monetization. As a result your blog will eventually wither away until it becomes abandoned altogether, its distinctiveness completely assimilated into the Web 2.0 Collective. Resistance is futile.

Ok, I’m exaggerating, (somewhat), but I have noticed a pattern where bloggers no longer seem to attend to their own blogs with the fervor they once had in the past, and these social networking sites have a lot to do with it. Playing on all those networks can definitely suck up a lot of your time, so much that your creative and physical energy is usually completely exhausted by the time you’re ready to come back to your own blogging home. This actually started to happen with me as well when I noticed I was actually posting more often on StumbleUpon than I was here. Bad Lincoln!! Bad!!!!!

Somehow a balance needs to be struck between utilizing these networks while also maintaining the growth of your own blog, and I think the answer lies in part by observing Facebook’s recent move to allow third party companies onto their platform. For them it’s all about pulling the features and services these companies have into their own network, providing a central location for the very best these third party services have to offer.

In a way I hope that’s what I’m accomplishing here. While I belong to a variety of networks from StumbleUpon to Last.FM (and beyond), using widgets and other plugin technologies has enabled me to pull everything here in one place, rather than watch it all being pushed out there. Even my Flickr Album can be completely viewed natively without any requisite need to go to Flickr. That I think is the key. Follow the Facebook model, and use networks and services to help to promote YOUR blog, not the other way around. Resist the Borg! Fight the power! Viva La Blog Revolucion!

Yeah yeah, there’s been some talk about butt faced men getting some serious cuddle time from hot women around the blogosphere, so naturally I had to chime in.

First of all, this is the Sun we’re talking about, you know, the UK tabloid Brits fondly refer to as a shag-rag, and which also sport fascinating headlines such as “Double Decker Bus Found on Moon!” As soon as I found out the source right away I knew this article was going to be a load of crap. I mean seriously, the dudes in the photos didn’t even appear all that ugly. They’re no Ben Afflecks, but they’re certainly don’t look like a bunch of butt balls either (though one of them could use a real haircut).

Was this really supposed to make Elephant men like me feel better? To me it just conveys the message, “Wow, lookie here, even the skanky ones are getting some loving, so there must REALLY be something wrong with you if you can’t match their success!” Thanks guys! Here, come a little bit closer so I can use an ice cream scoop to rip out that part of your throat box giving you that snooty British accent. Trust me, I’ll feel better if you do.

I sound bitter. Am I bitter?

Is it me, or does the mass of social networking (or Web 2.0) sites out there seem to be such an overwhelming chaos of convoluted information that even Einstein would have trouble making sense of it all?

Unfortunately though, not content to see 3 or 4 daily readers perusing my blog (despite my anti-social tendencies), I decided to make a journey through the social networking universe and see what was out there, and whether I wanted any of it to come back to my little corner on the web. I also needed a vehicle that would help me find relevant content that could truly inspire me (while also setting me apart from other bloggers). I started by going down the list of social networking sites found at Wiki, and from there I proceeded to spend the rest of the day clicking from place to place, sometimes bored, sometimes impressed, but mostly confused and perplexed.

Some sites seemed simple enough in its concept, but others begged the question: “What in the blue @#$% is the point of all this?” First there were the MySpace clones, some of which appear to improve on MySpace’s shortcomings. Whatever. As far as I was concerned, such sites were online slums exhibiting the worst that humanity had to offer, so I quickly moved on whenever it became obvious that a site I was visiting had been designed using a model similar to MySpace. To be fair, Facebook wasn’t nearly as bad or coarse as some of the MySpace pages I’ve surfed, but it’s really designed for those attending college (and for employees of popular companies).

Then it was on to sites that offered… well I wasn’t exactly sure what it was they offered. The worst offender I think had to be BlinkBits. I just stared at this thing for what had to be 30 minutes and I still couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to do. It did appear to be overwhelmed with spam though, and whenever I made a test submission, the content just seemed to get lost in all the advertising for Viagra. Hooo-kay…. Blinklist on the other hand seemed to be more polished, but it was still hard to understand the actual purpose of it. The list of “blinks” I sifted through didn’t seem appealing enough for me to check out (and again a lot of the blinks appeared to be spam).

My headaches from surfing finally started to wane when I began checking out the social bookmarking sites. Del.icio.us as some people by now probably know is the most popular one there is, but to me it seemed a little… bland. REALLY bland. So bland in fact that I thought for sure I was missing something, a key feature I was supposed to enable to access its full features. But nope, Del.icio.us was just a simple bookmarking service that utilizes tags to help you organize your bookmarks. Its interface though was just plain UGLY to me, and once I realized it couldn’t be changed, I began to understand why other social bookmarking sites like Ma.gnolia existed. I’ve already uploaded my bookmarks to Del.icio.us, but I think after I organize them I’ll export tham to Ma.gnolia, which has a much more polished and appealing interface to me. Del.icio.us seemed like the barebones equivalent of a Linux box, while Ma.gnolia gave me that happy-dappy, flower-filled MacOS feel, complete with sunshine and rainbows. There were a few other bookmarking services as well with some truly novel concepts, like Backflip’s method of organzing your bookmarks in a Yahoo style directory, but the rest more or less seemed redundant to me.

I then moved on to blogging oriented communities, like Xanga, Blogger and LiveJournal. But the most polished one I’ve found thus far was Vox.com, created by the makers of the MovableType blogging script. I’ve already been able to duplicate most, if not all of the features offered by these communities on my own blog, so I didn’t feel the need to join for the time being. One community that stood out a little though was MyBlogLog, which was designed with the idea of having people connect with other readers of their favorite blogs. I played around with it for a while, but didn’t see much use for it, partly because my favorite blogs weren’t listed, and partly because the listing of readers for a particular blog didn’t tell me much, if anything. All you see is a small thumbnail of the reader and their usually cryptic usernames underneath. It was still an interesting concept though, so I may decide to stick around and see if I can make it worth my while. There was another site called Squidoo that looked intriguing as well, giving users the ability to create “lenses” that were in essence start pages piecing together a variety of content reflecting the user’s personal interests. At least I think that’s what it is. It basically just offered a different way to organize content, but unfortunately the design seems to make it susceptible to spam as well. Some of the lenses read more like bland advertisements rather than a user’s actual personal take on places on the web that interested him.

For the most part I ignored some of the popular social networks based on specific themes since I was, ironically enough, already a member of them. Namely, I’m thinking of YouTube, Last.FM and Flickr. These three sites have definitely proved their weight in gold, and I’ve been consistently using all of them to complement my own blog. It’s funny, while I generally despise mainstream social networks like MySpace, these theme based networks on the other hand are like manna from heaven. There’s even a site called Doostang that’s designed to help people find jobs through social networking. Muy coolio.

I also came across a few nifty sites that offered a variety of ways for people to organize get-togethers and meetings in real life. Dodgeball (which uses mobile phones to send you alerts when friends and crushes are nearby) and Meetup (which allows you to find groups and meetings of interest in your area) were two of the best I’ve seen. If I had any friends I’m sure these services would certainly come in handy.

Finally, I soon I began descending on news oriented sites like Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, Tailrank, NewsVine (and many, many more). Newsvine by the way actually looked in some ways like NetVibes (a service that allows you to design your own personal start page through aggregation). It looked interesting, but WAY overloaded with content. It was one of those things that required your full attention in order to understand how it worked, but I suspect I’ll be investing a lot of time learning how to use all the features it offered only to end up wondering why I bothered in the first place. Tailrank was more blogging oriented, providing feeds for the user that can help you glean what
topics were currently drawing the most interest in the blogosphere. Reddit offered a Slashdot-like way to submit and discuss news items in a vanilla but very addictive format. Then there was Meshly, a service that offered a way for users to submit articles and content via instant messaging. Digg was far more polished in its look and voting system and remains one of the top sites in this particular category of social networks, but in the end I began to realize why these particular sites weren’t that appealing to me. In truth, I wasn’t really a news oriented person. I’m as interested in what’s happening in the world as anyone else of course, but sites like Digg and Reddit completely overwhelm you not just with news related items, but LONG discussion threads such news articles regularly spawn. They seem to go on forever, and ever, and ever, and…

I also noticed that these news oriented networks tend to draw a particularly monolothic demographic, so much that the vast majority of users that peruse these sites could probably be described as angry white male geekazoids who generally spend their pastime decrying in rabid fashion the latest evils of the current White House administration. Ironically enough, this probably would have still been the case had a site like Digg been launched in say, 1998, which back then would have undoubtedly provided an outlet for angry white male geekazoids to vent their frustrations over, uhhhh… the latest evils of the White House administration. In a way this is what I believe is the downside of time based content. It’s repetitive, cyclical, and ultimately boring. Wars come, wars go. Scandals come, scandals go. There really is nothing new under the sun. And I was getting tired of reading through news items that continuously sparked the same old rehashed arguments and flame wars ad infinitum. Good grief, tell me something NEW.

And yet the blogosphere is mostly awash in news, and discussions (or flame wars) over said news, so much that they start to become almost indistinguishable from one another. Where was the diversity? Where was the focus on timeless content, on things that might really matter? The void here was remarkably palpable to me, abandoned instead for themes that would guarantee the heaviest traffic: news and politics. Quality is forsaken in the never ending quest for quantity. And why not? Quantity after all is what brings in the mula.

Tired and weary from my online journey around the world, and from sifting through the endless content at places like Reddit and Digg, it occurred to me that I already had something wonderful and good all along, patiently waiting for me to come home. I had a means to explore timeless content the way it used to be done, back when the web was just getting started. Back when it wasn’t all about news, but about people, about true individuality and innovation. About things that mattered. That something was a small little toolbar currently residing at the top of my browser, provided to me by the good folks at StumbleUpon.

StumbleUpon was really what I had been looking for all along. A way to surf the web aimlessly and randomly, and yet still find wonderful places that I could bookmark or blog about in a heartbeat. I was finding content that mattered to me, content I never would have found in a million years perusing sites like Reddit or Digg, or even via a search on Google. The kind of community StumbleUpon offered also proved to be far more diverse, and a more accurate reflection of the general population of mankind. StumbleUpon was the kind of social network that attracted people from all walks of life, rather than just a particular demographic of smarmy geeks who coined phrases like “Web 2.0″ and “folksonomies,” and then expecting the rest of us mere mortals to know what the hell they’re talking about.

So finally, after two bleary eyed days of clicking and surfing, after seeing what’s out there and beyond, the prodigal blogger has finally stumbled his way home. And who knows, if even StumbleUpon should lose its appeal after time, I could always create my own social network.

Today’s blogosphere consists of a huge network of blogs linked together a variety of ways, most commonly via blogrolls or with the use of linkbacks. Normally, in order to fully assimilate and become a part of this blogging collective, you would need to surf a considerable number of blogs and regularly comment on the latest postings, either via their commenting system, or by blogging a post on your own site and referencing the material in question there (which is where linkbacks usually come in).

I rarely do this, which is part of the reason why my traffic is usually so low. Because I’m not putting myself out there, my visitors usually come in via Google or by word of mouth. But if I’m interested in getting more hits to my blog, why don’t I invest the time necessary to give it more exposure by participating more actively in the blogosphere community?

The truth is, gosh darn it, I just don’t like you people. Most of you are lewd, rude and appallingly crude. And you’re ugly. And you probably smell bad too.

Since I’m a loner in real life, that seems to have translated in some respects over to my blogging life as well. When I reflect on this, I realized part of it is because I just can’t stomach hanging out with people who are A) airheaded morons who have about as much common sense as a drunken Barbra Streisand or B) morally corrupt individuals who enjoy waking up in strange places after a night of inebriation and snorting up white powder. Then there’s the occasional C) self anointed intellectuals who use an inflated vocabulary to argue or discuss anything from politics to relationships, when half the time their fond use of lofty words used by only 2 percent of the population merely disguises the fact that they are just as much a bunch of dumbasses as the entire cast of contestants on The Bachelor.

Evidently though, just finding a circle of people who have a good head on their shoulders, follow a reasonable moral code, and refrain from talking like 80 year old law professors so they can show people just how diddly darned smart they are seems to be a tall order these days.

Oh well. I guess that’s the price I pay for being unique.

Lately the blogosphere has been dishing out advice for beginning law school students by the dozen, mostly by professors offering a suggestion or two on how to survive law school. Some are good, the rest make me wonder what reality these people are living in. And while there’s plenty of suggestions on how to perform well in school to go around, so far no one has given these “pearls of wisdom” a critical look to see if they’re truly worth their weight in gold. Enter, yours truly.

Below contains a summary of most of the advice I’ve found so far, followed by my own personal critique. Note: I found tips for students going through orientation and some advice that dealt strictly with how to brief cases, but I decided to ignore them since they don’t deal with the overall picture.

Suggestion #1: Develop a strong work ethic.

My initial response: No @#$% Sherlock. Honestly, this could apply to just about everything else in life, and if a student hasn’t learned by law school the value of having a strong work ethic, he never will. I don’t know what’s worse, that this is the kind of advice law school students are being given, or the fact that some feel it’s necessary to reiterate those life lessons we should have already learned in kindergarten.

Suggestion #2: Working smart is as important as working hard.

This might have been helpful, except virtually no information is given on how a student can work SMART. Instead we’re just fed some analogical anecdotes that tell us nothing. Anyone with a positive IQ point knows they have to work smart as well as hard, but the key issue is, HOW? We’re not told that here.

Suggestion #3: Read the materials in casebooks actively/Do the reading.

It’s true that law school isn’t about memorizing and regurgitating legal rules, but about learning how to skillfully perform legal analysis. However, being an avid reader in casebooks is a moot point if you’re not told WHAT to look for, as if earnestly reading badly written casebooks will somehow magically impart in you the skills necessary to perform a lawyerlike analysis. The truth is you have to first KNOW the law (otherwise known as Black Letter Law), before you can learn analyzing it and then applying it to various scenarios (fact patterns). But the necessary Black Letter Law can be so buried inside the casebooks that you may end up wasting eons of time just trying to find the relevant BBL before doing anything else, much less taking a crack at doing legal analysis.

Suggestion #4: Refrain from using a lot of study aids.

We’re told here that study aids can be inaccurate, and even if they were accurate, relying on them would discourage the hard work needed to perform legal analysis. Yeah right. What study aids, (specifically ones like primers and commercial outlines) can do is give you the BBL plain and simple, making it far easier for you to learn and internalize the relevant law, and thus provide a foundation for which you can learn how to perform a lawyerlike analysis of fact patterns. You CANNOT analyze cases and fact patterns until you first become familiar with (and have internalized) the relevant Black Letter Law. Good study aids can help you accomplish this by helping you learn BBL in a straightforward and easy to understand manner.

Suggestion #5: Don’t think about exams right away.

The professor bemoans over how too many students are concerned about exams and even ask questions about it on the first day of school. Might that have something to do with the fact that for the most part, a student’s grade for the class will be almost completely based on one final exam? Naturally that’s going to make a student a wee bit curious about the exam’s contents, and how can he can appropriately prepare for it beforehand.

Suggestion #6: Treat law school like a job.

This one isn’t so bad. I would venture so far as to say you should treat law school like a FULL-TIME job. I’m sure a lot of student suffer from a “party mentality” that they developed during their undergrad days, and find themselves dismayed at the thought that law school will require them to actually have to WORK for their grades. Time-wise, investing 40 hours a week towards your studies is not bad advice, especially if you are studying the right way, and it emphasizes the importance of creating a schedule that will bring some order to your daily routine, helping you to balance studying time with free time without sacrificing either.

Suggestion #7: Exercise.

Duh.

Suggestion #8: Maintain outside interests/Take a break every now and then from law school.

It’s certainly a given that law school should not be your WHOLE life. But there’s something wrong when law school seems to create such an isolating environment that students feel they have no choice but to let it monopolize ALL of their time at the expense of everything else, including their relationships with family and friends. It’s one thing if it’s because law school is just uniquely demanding, but it’s quite another when a large part of it may be because of a badly flawed pedagogy that often sends students chasing after their own tails.

Suggestion #9: It’s ok to feel lost.

Gee, thanks. Instead of being a part of the problem, why not be a part of a solution and develop a teaching method where students WON’T feel so lost? And no, it’s NOT ok to feel lost because we SHOULDN’T be feeling lost to begin with. What are we paying you guys for anyway?

Suggestion #10: Talk to your professors and ask them questions.

After admitting to the shortcomings of legal education, we’re entreated here to approach our professors outside the classroom for help. This might be all well and good if A) the professor has sufficient enough time to help you out and B) he actually happens to be a GOOD teacher. But if not, what then? And what if you have a REALLY bad professor, as opposed to one who is merely an incompetent idiot? In many cases these very professors are perpetuating the students’ problems in trying to learn the law. Talking to them may help you get a sense of what they are looking for, but if they’re the sort that love to play hide the ball and other mind games, then this kind of advice won’t take you very far.

Suggestion #11: Take classes based on who the professor is, not what the subject is.

This is very good (and telling) advice. I’ve heard elsewhere that the best classes students ever had was not because of the subject, but because the professor was so good. This may not apply to first year law students who’ve had their schedule preprepared though, but if you can choose your professor, even if the subject sounds drop dead boring, it would be sorely worth it just to sit in a class where the professor has an excellent reputation.

Suggestion #12: Take practice exams.

YES. ABSO-FREAKING-LUTELY. Taking old exams given by professors in the past is one of the best ways to prepare yourself for the real one. Practice does make perfect, and being able to practice on old
exams is an opportunity you should never pass up. More importantly, start taking practice exams early in the semester (maybe about midway). Do not start taking them a week before the final exam. This is something you should work on throughout the semester rather than as a means of cramming for the final exam.

Suggestion #13: Go to class.

This just in: water is wet.

Suggestion #14: Law school is tough. Deal with it.

This one gave me a headache. After being told law school will suck up all my time and then some, I’m then advised that one way of dealing with the stress is to (you guessed it), make time for myself and my family.

Suggestion #15: Use law review articles to help learn and understand the material.

I’m not sure about this one, as this is the first time I’ve heard of the use of law review articles as a study aid. She does make a point about Commercial Outlines not being sufficient unto themselves, since they only convey black letter law without providing the reasoning (or policy) behind them. That’s where the use of a good primer comes in though.

Suggestion #16: Find out what works best for you.

As LawMommy would say, this one should be emblazoned on a t-shirt, not because it’s good advice, but because it’s been said repeatedly, over… and over… and over… and over again.

Closing Thoughts:

Blackprof.com offers some of the better advice for law students that I’ve found so far, and Madisonian.net also offers a few tips definitely worth looking into (with the possible exception of the suggestion that you should brief every day). As for me personally, I indicated before that I believe legal education is (or should be) a two step process: 1) To learn and internalize Black Letter Law and 2) Applying your knowledge of Black Letter Law to different scenarios and fact patterns. I honestly believe it can be as simple as that, but for whatever reason there seems to be a perpetual need to inject mystical qualities into the law by the powers that be, making it far harder to master than it should be. I suspect a lot of it is by design, and is being perpetuated by little more than elitist snobbery.