Via the Boston ERISA Law Blog, I learn that the crackerjack marketing team diligent legal researchers at LexisNexis have named their Top 50 Blogs for Insurance for 2008. Notwithstanding the obstacles in the grueling selection process posed by my having gone more than five months without a new post here, and by my having produced only eight posts on this site since the start of the year, Decs&Excs makes the list.
Although I am pleased at being included, and have promptly installed the "Top 50 blogs" badge in the right hand sidebar, there are aspects of this list that cause me to arch a brow in a Spock-like and quizzical fashion.
To begin, it appears that the compilers have had to stretch their definitions of "insurance law blog" more than slightly, in order to puff the list up to fifty. The list includes several examples of weblogs that are excellent in their own right, but that have no real insurance connection.
- I am as much an admirer of Ernie The Attorney as anyone -- he was one of my inspirations as a legal blogger and has been included in my blogrolls from Day One -- but insurance is simply not his field.
- Kevin O'Keefe's Real Lawyers Have Blogs? Also valuable and a longtime resident of my blogroll, but not because Kevin has ever focused on insurance law.
- And Urban Law Journal, which I'd not seen before, certainly looks interesting but, again, has essentially nothing to do with insurance.
There's a lesson here of some kind. Something about meeting quotas for the quotas' own sake, perhaps, or about setting the size of a list sufficiently high that almost no one will be omitted. ["LexisNexis to Insurance Bloggers: 'All have won, and all must have prizes.'"] Whether they precisely fit the award category or not, at least the recipients of LexisNexis' favor are all worthwhile sites. And they actually exist, unlike certain award-winning restaurants in the news recently.
The other intriguing, or disturbing, or perhaps backhandedly comforting, discovery that I have made in sifting through the LexisNexis Top 50-give-or-take Insurance Blogs is this: I am not alone among insurance bloggers in experiencing a major drop-off in posting frequency. Many of the more established or "senior" risk and insurance weblogs -- sites that I follow and that have been in existence for more than a year or two -- are going longer between new posts than they have in the past. For example:
- Marc Meyerson's Insurance Scrawl has had nothing new since February.
- RiskProf is managing at least one or two posts per month. Even with three current authors, the site is operating at a slower pace than when Martin Grace was running it on his own.
- David Rossmiller's heretofore unstoppable Insurance Coverage Blog (which I regard as the current gold standard of insurance blogging) has gone as long as a week or more between posts recently -- almost alarming given the extended run of daily updates with which Mr. R earned his sterling blogging reputation. (I cannot help noticing that Rossmiller and two out of three RiskProfs were seen dining together in early August. Significant? Draw your own conclusions.)
Even weblogs that have not previously been on my own radar, several of which I now intend to add to my RSS feed and/or blogroll, seem to be succumbing to the slowdown. In California alone, examples of weblogogical deceleration can be seen at Cal Insurance Regulation, the Health Insurance Blog and California Insurance Lawyer Blog.
Of course, it is easy, even accurate, to urge that quality should matter as much as or more than quantity: if a blogger goes days, weeks, months (who knows?) between posts of extraordinary depth and insight, who are we readers to complain? Not a bad argument, to which the obvious counter is that frequency of updates is generally seen as one of the defining features of a weblog.
"Your point being . . . ?" you ask.
"Not much of a point," I reply, except as a sort of throat clearing in anticipation of attempting yet again to reaccelerate my own commitment to this weblog.
In the meantime, while I am overcoming my phlegmatic attitude, those with an interest in insurance and risk issues should consider browsing at random through the LexisNexis 50, where there is ample information, talent and acumen to be discovered.
Yes, the LexisNexis blog honor roll appears to be kind of a joke. No doubt geared toward getting LexisNexis exposure, given away by them wanting you to wear a big LexisNexis badge on your blog.
I'm going to blog this and ask LexisNexis and Ogilvy, their PR company for a response.
Posted by: Kevin O'Keefe | September 15, 2008 at 11:18 PM
http://www.coveragepoint.com
Posted by: John | September 21, 2008 at 10:40 PM