Blogging on Blogs About Blogs

3LEpiphany, the law student who's blogging for credit, whom I mentioned lo, these many posts ago, seems to have generated a (relatively) huge amount of interest very quickly, partly due to his initial outreach, but mostly due to curiosity about his (very well focused) topic, and the sort of "viral marketing" that movie studios have been trying to recreate ever since The Blair Witch Project.

I'm sure it helps immensely that legal blogging is so widespread and well established, and that lawyers and law students seem to be online all the time.

Seems to me the primary thing a blogger has to do to attract lots of traffic is be fairly narrowly focused. (Quite unlike myself.) And then have one or more of the following traits:

1. Be amusing.
2. Be current.
3. Be interesting.
4. Be useful.

(Apropos of nothing, as Geoff Nunberg used to say in class, I think that talk of the blogosphere as spelling the end of so-called "mainstream media" is, for now, just talk: a blog, or cluster of blogs, that could replace the mainstream media... would have to essentially duplicate the mainstream media. In other words, would become the mainstream media. The same way Al Pacino became the Godfather...)