16 Mar “Blog” References
Ever wonder whether blogs have become mainstream? Typically one has no easy answer to the question of whether blogs have become an acceptable medium for academic discourse. We rely on anecdotes, intuition or hunches.
I thought it might be interesting to add yet another unscientific reference point to determine whether blogs have become mainstream. How? By considering how often the word “blog” is mentioned in various Westlaw libraries (specifically the JLR, ALLNEWS, and ALLCASES databases). Of course, this is not an accurate survey of actual blog citations, but it does give one a sense of the current trends.
Based on the numbers, it appears that blog references are already mainstream in the news media, are not yet mainstream in law reviews and journals, and have a long, long way to go before they are mainstream in judicial opinions. Here are the results for references to the word “blog” in the three databases over the past seven years:
ALLNEWS:
2000: 34 references
2001: 120 references
2002: 545 references
2003: 3215 references
2004: 10,000+ references
2005: 10,000+ references
2006: 10,000+ references
JLR:
2000: 0 references
2001: 1 reference
2002: 12 references
2003: 40 references
2004: 148 references
2005: 410 references
2006: 727 references
ALLCASES:
2000: 4 references
2001: 0 references
2002: 2 references
2003: 1 references
2004: 4 references
2005: 17 references
2006: 28 references
Before checking my credit history, I ran another search in JLR: “web log” weblog. Results: 531 documents. But of course most of these, I imagined, also used “blog” as the shortened form. Surprisingly, the search (“web log” weblog) % blog generated 206 documents! At a glance, the majority of these results included weblog in a URL, not exactly an explicit reference to blogs, but probably an indirect use of one.
The same search in ALLNEWS (i.e., either term but not blog): 5,725 documents.
In ALLCASES: precisely 10.
A couple rough conclusions: (1) Even where “blog” has caught on, the more formal term “web log” (or “weblog”) continues to enjoy relatively significant use. (2) I sure am glad I have free access to Westlaw.