Concurring Opinions Signs Off

The once-great group law blog is ending its run.

Concurring Opinions, one of the popular general law professor group blogs that I read daily for years, has decided to close up shop. This isn't a big surprise, as the once-vibrant group blog hadn't had much content recently.

I'm reminded of Matt Bodie's question in 2005 about what the future of law blogs would be -- a question asked, ironically, in response to the fouding of Concurring Opinions:

We still seem to be in the early stages of the blogosphere. But I'm wondering, particularly with respect to law blogs, what the future holds. Here are a few possibilities as to directions we'll take in the future.
1. We're in the "Far and Away" land rush phase, and pretty soon the continent will be filled up.
2. We're in the early Internet Boom phase, and a big shakeup is coming down the pike.
3. Blogging is a transitional technology that will lead to new forms of connectivity and creativity. Current bloggers will lead the way to these new formats.

I had some predictions of my own on this in 2005, too.

I'm not entirely sure how to best describe what that future has become, although there does seem to be less interest in blogging among law professors these days. Part of that may be the rise of Twitter. And part of it may be that blogging didn't bring the career payoffs that a lot of law professors thought it would when the "blogosphere" was young, at least relative to the time it took.

Comments

[Eddy]

"there does seem to be less interest in blogging among law professors these days. Part of that may be the rise of Twitter."

Professors are tweeting their law-review articles sentence by sentence?

[David Bremer]

No, but I'm not sure that changes the total volume of their writing that is actually read. Whatever the medium, 99% of people won't go past the first 140 characters.

[AmosArch]

Collateral damage as the Wild West Internet 1.0 shifts into the Technofascist Internet 2.0 I guess. You see it all around you. We used to have chatrooms and forums. Then people figured out they weren't interested in meeting new faces and learning new ideas and would rather have isolated fiefdoms roughly corresponding to their RL social network except with more narcissism so these mostly went the way of the dodo. Except for niche areas they couldn't be replaced. Now the rest of the old social media and in some ways the wider web continues to consolidate itself under the Sillycon Valley Megacorps. People whine about wanting independence and freedom but the vast majority will gladly let their digital selves be vivisected g00gle's latest AI. Thats fine, Chinese social credit coming to America is fine. But on the bright side we have mandatory ssm cake baking, and anybody thinking of denying this fundamental right does so at their peril. Gotta draw the line somewhere.

[rsteinmetz]

I agree with the Mega-Corp part. The opportunity for blogging on an independent open platform has been increasing limited due to content restrictions and demand for personal information to feed the advertising machine to pay for the infrastructure. There are smaller independent venues but they do not offer the Internet Entrepreneur the opportunity to gain fame and fortune.

[Brett Bellmore]

It was fairly obvious this was coming. The posting frequency was dropping, and they'd ceased site maintenance. (The comment system has been increasingly glitchy for months.)

Still sad to see the site go. At least all the posts permitted comments, unlike Balkinization, which is where I understand at least some of them are going to continue posting.

[Naaman Brown]

Typo: ... fouding ...