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Collected Wisdom
Law students who blog are constantly offering advice to other law students-to-be. This means there's a wealth of up-to-date information available for those who are interested, but it's not always easy to find. I wonder if we could devise some sort of advice aggregator, some central location to collect all this wisdom (or at least links to it) so that people would know where to go when looking for advice from people who have gone before them.
What do you think? Would it be good to have a blawg about blawgs (that would be a metablawg), specifically focused on advice from law students to law students? It seems like the alternative is what has been happening, which is that law students who blog all just randomly collect the advice we see here and there and hope people just happen to find it. That means we might spend a good amount of time and effort putting down some thoughts that we hope will help someone else in the future, yet that effort is wasted if the people who need it can't find it. Also, I've found numerous times that I read some good advice somewhere, but don't really need to think about that topic until later. Then, when I need the advice, I can't remember where it was. If we had a central repository of links to all the advice we read or write or know about, maybe it would be easier to find the exact information you need, when you need it.
So I propose this:
Blawg Wisdom: Advice about law school from those who are in it.
The idea is to create an advice aggregator. If you write or read a post from a law student, professor, or legal practitioner primarily containing advice about any aspect of law school or job searching while in law school or immediately after, please tell me about it (via email) . Tell me where it is (the URL), and if you can, provide a short summary of what readers will find there. I will post a link to it with your summary (or mine). Eventually, we should end up with a nice collection of advice that will be easily-accessible to all who are interested.
If you are a coding wizard of some sort and could help create a web form to collect advice submissions (so that people don't have to do it via email), that would be terrific.
And if you would like to share in the joy of keeping Blawg Wisdom up-to-date, let me know and I can add you as a poster. If you're part of the BlawgCoop, you'll be automatically set up to post at Blawg Wisdom, as well.
Posted August 1, 2004 05:02 PM | advice law school meta-blogging
You could do this in an automated fashion by using TrackBack-- see http://www.lazyweb.org/ for one such use.
Posted by: Andrew at August 1, 2004 08:45 PM
yep, automate it. if people categorize their posts (ie "advice") you can aggregate on that. this is what i do with various tools i built for my own reading. obviously if they don't dispense categorized wisdom then it's much harder.
Posted by: jose at August 1, 2004 09:37 PM
Hey, thanks for the tips. It would be awesome to set up something like this so it would be automatic, but you put your finger on the problem as I see it: People just don't dispense catergorized wisdom. Heck, a great number of blawgers don't even have categories, and many use software that doesn't support categories. (Does the new Blogger.com support categories for BlogSpot blogs?)
I also don't think most people would send trackback pings for special advice posts, and I doubt more than a handful could even be convinced to include the lazyweb incantation (looks like they'd have to add a link to the Blawg Wisdom aggregator so the site would know to include their content). To be perfectly honest, I expect few people to submit advice via the email link. (Wow. I shock myself w/my own pessimism.)
That said, if I get more time maybe I'll try to set something up so the automatic inclusion thing would be available for those who *do* want to do it. If either of you has any spare time on your hands, I'll gladly give you free reign to run wild with your mad coding skilz! ;-)
Posted by: ambimb at August 1, 2004 10:31 PM
Just a suggestion as my technical knowledge of running these things is rather limited. But when Invisible Adjunct went off the air, some of the regular readers created a topic channel at the Internet Topic Exchange. You can find it at http://topicexchange.com/. Maybe this could be what you are looking for?
Posted by: Famou P at August 2, 2004 02:09 PM
