22 December 2006

The Demise Of CrimLaw

I've been considering shutting down CrimLaw for a while now. In the last couple months I have seen two of my favorite blogs go down even though they still enjoyed great popularity (Commonwealth Conservative and Southern Appeal). On the other hand, CrimLaw's readership has slipped significantly over the last year. Without random hits from Google I'm not sure that the number of daily hits would rise much above 100 per day. There are numerous reasons for this which need not be dwelled upon. In any case, it has become harder and harder to justify the effort to keep up a blog which is limping along. There is also another project I am more interested in at the moment and I want to spend time developing it. Consequently, I am closing up shop.

I want to thank all those of you who have spent your precious moments (usually stolen from work if sitemeter is correct) reading my posts over the last few years. I especially want to thank everyone who has from time to time helped out by posting here either in comments or as a guest. In particular, there were times over the last few months when there would have no posting except for the efforts of Steve Armstrong (2L Appalachian School of Law) and Daniel Dovel (3L West Virginia Law). Thank you gentlemen.


As for me, I'm moving on to do a weekly videocast about the Virginia political scene. I've been doing it now for about 5 weeks and the bugs aren't all worked out, but I have high hopes. Feel free to click here to drop by and watch.

7 Comments:

Sorry to see you go Ken. Good luck to you in your endeavours for a long time to come.
From my perspective, the blog just hasn't been the same since you obviously can't talk about your daily work any more. I would have liked to hear how your experiences as a defense attorney help or encumber you in your new duties and especially whether your new perspectives have made you reevaluate opinions you had formed. Anyway, again, all the best. Don't be surprised if I drop in some day to check up on you, it's not too far. ;)

By  martin, at December 23, 2006  

Ah, Ken, I'm gonna miss you. Your blog has been a lot of fun.

Take care of yourself, and be sure to let all your old friends know when you start your inevitable run for office.

-- Mark "Windypundit" Draughn

By  Windypundit, at December 23, 2006  

Ken,

What a bad week for the blogosphere. Just before Christmas, two of my favorite blogs, Southern Appeal and CrimLaw, both pass into history. (And here I thought I had been pretty good this year.)

CrimLaw was one of my daily reads and while I am not happy about losing you, I have been there myself and I completely understand the time commitment a first class blog takes.

CrimLaw was a blog to be proud of and served as one of the models for for my own abortive effort. You will be greatly missed but please know that you were an inspiration to me and I daresay , to many other bloggers as well.

You will me greatly missed. Good luck with your future endeavors.

By  Anonymous, at December 23, 2006  

Your blogging will be missed, Ken. And if you only get 100 hits a day that is sad, but I am 1 of them and I do know one other reader as well. So 2 people at least will be missing you.

I probably should save your link list if you're going to take the site down.

Too bad about this. Probably your new employment, on the other side of things, isn't totally compatible with your blogging style. A defense attorney has to defend his client zealously, but a prosecutor has to do 'justice' whatever that means, and so he can't really write the same sort of courtroom anecdote that a defense attorney can. I mean, if a prosecutor writes something like "yeah the sentence was totally unfair to this guy, but heck, he should have pled", he'll totally be busted! He's pretty much gotta write "another glorious 5-year prison sentence for farting in a school zone. Justice is served! Praise our soviet government oops I mean God Bless the USA"

So I can see you having trouble blogging that sort of way, and well while I would really be interested in what it's like to switch sides of the courtroom and certainly some others would be, your decision to desist is understandable.

Thank you for all the hours of reading enjoyment.

By  Anonymous, at December 23, 2006  

Ken,

Thanks for everything! You made CrimLaw an important stop on the daily reading circuit.

I wouldn't believe some logs. Some are set up so that they don't count a significant number of visits because of time-outs or for other reasons. Others will not give you an idea of the distributed feedreaders. The counters for the German American Law Journal range from 150/day to 3000/day, and the truth is somewhere in between. Based on your high-quality output, I would guess that CrimLaw has a lot more readers than that counter makes you think.

In any case, all the best and a happy New Year!

Clemens

By  Anonymous, at January 02, 2007  

One of your Aussie readers here (Pleader, commenting from workplace on a quiet day back). Sorry to see you go Ken, it has been very interesting reading the various oddities you posted, and I truly enjoyed the personal experiences you shared at times. On a couple occasions, it was your own commentary which helped me feel less isolated (isn't the internet weird?). Anyway, good luck with wherever your star leads.

By  Anonymous, at January 02, 2007  

Say it ain't so. You can't leave, Ken. What am I going to do with that first 2 minutes of my morning? I guess I still have blonde justice and legal underground but I hate the idea of replacing you with Ted Frank.
Good luck, Ken. Your musings will be sorely missed.

By  Litigator, at January 04, 2007  

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