What is the value of this thing called a "BLOG"?

by Richard Schenkar

Weblogs (or blogs) are personal diaries animated by personal interest that are accessible on the Internet. They are driven by a number of personal desires like elimination of frustration, ego satisfaction, and a need to share information.

This emotion makes weblogs valuable as an information source because the emotion
drives people to find and display resources not otherwise available to you. The emotion also creates a practical and ethical problem for the user of the information because the credibility of the source and of the data may be suspect. There is value in observing the raw emotion that may be displayed in weblogs because one may be better prepared to answer questions never raised, but in the mind, of the trier of fact. Weblogs find and expose you to information you cannot find elsewhere because they push into areas of the hidden Internet not indexed by search tools we generally use. They add other facts, other sources, and helpful (if sometimes passionate) commentary.

Weblogs are everywhere—you could consider this column to be a weblog. If you are
interested in news, you could check several news-oriented weblog portals which include Warblog at http://www.crisis.blogspot.com or Blogarama at http://www.blogarama.com. You can even start your own weblog with a template at http://www.pitas.com.

Weblogs are of practical use to trial lawyers when they distill the experience of people into a format that is indexed and therefore reasonably easy to find. There are several indexes of weblogs available.  Most of the indexes drive users to advertisements and other diversions, but there are some helpful sites. You can check Blogdex, which is on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology website at http://blogdex.media.mit.edu,
Eatonweb at http://portal.eatonweb.com, and Weblogs, at http://www.weblogs.com .

Blogdex allows you to search for the Internet address (or uniform resource locator) of a weblog by typing in a character string to a search box. There is little other control over
the command line. So, when you type in the word "law," you will retrieve materials on
lawn care, admiralty law, and an interesting German site on Afghan law.

Eatonweb indexes thousands of weblogs in many languages. After you arrive, scroll to
the right to see the index menu. When I checked, there were 60 law/government/politics weblogs and 10 weblogs on medicine. One of the weblogs indexed in the Medicine collection was one patient's breast-cancer journal.

If you are interested in knowing if a particular weblog has been updated in the past three hours, you can check that on Weblogs, at http://www.weblogs.com.

No one should be surprised that one of the better weblogs is devoted to
technology. It is called Slashdot at http://slashdot.org/ and provides access to what it calls "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." It includes
news, discussions and commentaries, and a series of digests of longer articles available by hypertext link. It is the format that is being adopted by a number of weblogs.
 
There is an interesting weblog of importance and interest to trial lawyers that grew into
its own website—it is called Overlawyered, at http://www.overlawyered.com/. There is a body of positive and negative commentary on lawyers and the legal system here. Astute trial lawyers will study and deal effectively with the issues raised by the emotional rhetoric on this website.