TechnoLawyer Calls Avvo Top Legal Blog List a Joke
Neil Squillante over at TechnoLawyer Blog wrote an interesting post panning our Top Legal Blogs list. He even offered some suggestions as to how to make it better. We are always interested in feedback, so I decided to open a dialogue by commenting on his blog. Unfortunately the link for “commenting” went to a generic email address and the email I sent him has not been posted on TechnoLawyer. So I thought I’d post it here. (I won’t linger on the abject irony of TechnoLawyer having a blog without a working comment function.)
Neil – thanks for the post on the Top Legal Blogs – sadly your “comment” links to this email address – feel free to update your post with the following:
Thanks for my Monday afternoon slap in the face and yes, I agree, we could do with more of that within our legal blogging world. Believe it or not, yours is the third suggestion I’ve received today about what we should be doing and how we should change. We listen to all of the feedback and often implement suggestions. In that spirit, let me offer the following rejoinder: regarding Alexa – it is far from reliable, and I suspect if Bezos was actually aware they owned it, it might get a bullet. However, to date I can’t find a publically available solution with a broader reach. Regarding your suggestions:
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1. Go entirely editorial – someone once said something about opinions. To that end, we’re pretty partial to data. I would argue that opinions influenced by politicking and popularity (no offense ABA) can be even more useless than subpar Alexa data. (But that’s just my opinion.)
2. Use Compete – Great suggestion and we built our list initially with Compete data in mind. The problem was that it had such a limited data set that the vast number of legal blogs didn’t even register. In the spirit of your point about a large sample size, this would make our list even less useful.
3. SiteMeter – I applaud your accuracy argument. The person we hired to identify all of the lawyers in the US who write blogs, get them to agree on a common tracking methodology and walk them through the complexities of installing it through a myriad of hosting services did a terrible job. He was fired. Unfortunately I’ve been having trouble filling his position.
(Oh – and thanks for the update on how to spell “meantime” although I’ll never convert to “blawg”.)
Regards,
Conrad
May 19th, 2009 at 11:53 am
Conrad, thank you for your reply and opening this dialogue. I would like to clarify how we handle blog comments. We have a unique commenting system that we feel rewards contributors more than that found on typical blogs.
In fact, let’s start with your blog, which works similarly to most others. Your Post appears up top in the spotlight and my reply appears way down here, easily ignored, especially for those reading in a newsreader.
By contrast, your reply to my article will appear as the lead article this Friday in our Fat Friday newsletter, which has about 11,500 subscribers as of today. Trust me — many more people will read it than if we appended it to my article on our blog.
I apologize if our process is unclear. If you hover long enough with your mouse over our comment link, you’ll see that it says:
“We’ll publish your comment in this blog and/or in one of our newsletters.”
If we had decided to publish your reply in our blog, we would have done so as a proper article, again not as a typical comment. Thank you.
May 19th, 2009 at 1:29 pm
Neil – thanks for the comment. Looking forward to the post on Friday.
-Conrad
May 19th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
Conrad-
I think your points (or are they counter-points?) are solid.
Alexa data is certainly imperfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s useless. At least for our site (Lawyerist.com) it has done a good job of tracking our recent growth — which has been reflected in our rise in the Avvo Top Blogs rankings.
While I’m glad to hear that you are working on ways to improve your ranking system, I just wanted you to know that there are legal bloggers who find value in the admittedly-imperfect list you provide.
Best,
-Aaron
May 19th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Also, Neil, I gotta say — though you run a successful site, so I’m probably not one to judge — I really don’t understand your blog comment system either.
May 19th, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Conrad:
While you would run into privacy concerns and your data would be limited to those blogs that use Google Analytics (and allow you access to the data), there may be a way to get more accurate rankings using Google Analytics new API.
And, for the record, I agree with Aaron. The list is fun and interesting as it is… if taken for what it is.
May 20th, 2009 at 10:04 am
Nick – you’d be gobsmacked, shocked, astounded, bewildered and utterly amazed at the number of blogs and legal websites that don’t have analytics installed. I did a cursory survey and the number was around 10%.
May 21st, 2009 at 8:13 pm
Conrad:
I use your legal blog list all of the time to find new blogs to read. I have written features in Pittsburgh Legal Back Talk on some of them that I have found interesting and have installed them on my blogroll. I did a piece just last night on Great Reads from my Blogroll. Most of my favorites are not in the top 100. I like to keep tabs on what my peer group in the mid to low 200′s is doing. Keep the list. It doesn’t have to be that accurate. Although, I must say, it is disturbing to be outranked by a blog that closed down months ago.
CLT
May 22nd, 2009 at 12:47 pm
How do those of you who support the list square my criticism of major blogs in Alexa absent from Avvo’s list? Just to be clear, I’m not talking about technical issues such as blogs that use subdomains. I’m talking about major blogs for which Alexa data exists.
For example, Jonathan Turley won the ABA Blawg 100 award so it certainly qualifies as a legal blog. According to Alexa, it would rank in the top ten in Avvo’s list if included — but it’s not as of Monday when I published my critique — and it’s still not included as of today.
May 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm
While on the subject of this blog’s illiteracy, I might as well point out that your sentence with Bezos is in the wrong tense. It should have said if Bezos “were” not was.
May 23rd, 2009 at 2:44 pm
Have you stopped updating your Legal Blog Roll? I see it has not changed since May 7th.
May 26th, 2009 at 10:32 pm
Also, Neil, I gotta say — though you run a successful site, so I’m probably not one to judge — I really don’t understand your blog comment system either.
June 9th, 2009 at 7:39 am
Conrad,
What’s the status of the top legal blog list?
You haven’t updated it in over a month.
June 11th, 2009 at 11:42 am
We are working on getting this fixed. Sorry it has taken so long.
-Conrad