Interlude 13. A Tale of Two (or Three) Blogs

kanBARoo court reached the million mark yesterday. No, not a million subscribers, unfortunately. You reach this mark from the far side: kanBARoo court is now among the million top blogs if what's "top" depends on three-month traffic.

Two companies estimate the popularity of blogs. Alexa bases its estimates on a large (nonrandom) sample of readers; Google on the inbound connectedness with the rest of the Internet. The two measures correlate substantially, but kanBARoo court diverges between Alexa's traffic estimate and Google's link-based estimate, on which kanBARoo court scores 2 on Google's 0 to 9 logarithmic scale. One of my other blogs Disputed Issues, whose traffic rank (about 1.4 million) is significantly weaker than kanBARoo court's and whose Google page rank substantially stronger (4), shows a typical correspondence. Disputed Issues is a half year newer than kanBARoo court and contains half as many entries. (My third blog Juridical Coherence is too new for comparison.)

kanBARoo court may be unequaled in the disparity between its traffic rank and Google page rank, which affects priority in search-result placement. Maybe someone else will examine how Google's search monopoly and its rankings press toward ideologically conforming Internet networks. My interest is monopolization of legal-ethics' discussion and state-bar law by the state-bar establishment. Like many independent dissenters, I link outside my blogs judiciously, but when I do, the links most often point to opposed positions. The state-bar establishment blahgs — the absence of controversy makes them anything but interesting — intentionally avoid pointing to opposed positions or inimical institutions; they link as political tool. One establishmentarian blogger posted as much: "I am not going to link to his post, as that would give him Google juice." (See http://tinyurl.com/loxxgx.)

Contrast the lawblahgs with bloggers opposing the state bars. Whether primarily dedicated to freeing Richard I. Fine (see, for example, http://tinyurl.com/nqjptj), exposing biased judges (http://tinyurl.com/mu6e4h), or rectifying the Ramparts' victimizations (http://tinyurl.com/l59jqd), we seldom cite to each other or feature a blogroll advertising congenial blogs. We're obviously going to show more independence than the state-bar establishment and its cheerleaders, but we also have ideological and legal differences, even literary differences, we don't ignore.

The state-bar establishment, like an ordinary commercial monopolist, trades [links] as means to continue finding advantage in collusive combination. This is their right — although maybe not Google's to furnish the incentives fostering collusion — but the rarefied Internet is only a shadow of the world outside, where to marginalize opposition the state-bar establishment will use all means, including in California redoubling the calumny against state-bar respondents through an early-publications policy.