Apologies for this being very, very late….
As mentioned before, pretty much everyone who attended the conference blogged about it. (Larry Solum has one of the more detailed summaries. So does Ian Best.)
I'm glad I attended, even though I was pretty wiped out and giving up necessary paper-writing time. This obviously is a topic of great interest to me, and it was extremely constructive to hang out with some of the luminaries in this space. (I was also due a blogging colloquium, dammit!)
My overall impression was that there is some trepidation within the academy about the role of blogging, even by prolific bloggers. But I think this is due in part to the amorphous nature of what it means to be a law professor and the professional need for their own personal definitions to conform with those of their peers. Also there was Professor Barnett's comment, "If I were standing before an audience of non-bloggers I would be all 'rah-rah blogging.' But because I'm not I think it's important to point out some caveats." The biggest downside raised overall was the time-suck factor - was blogging taking away from something else they should have been doing.
But I found, particularly with the morning panels, that the discussion was rather insular, focusing almost exclusively on the role of blogging within the academy. Of course, nominally that's what both sessions were supposed to do. But I mean that the analysis focused so exclusively on the role of blogging within their professional sphere that it missed out on an accurate valuation their blogging has beyond the academy.
I'm speaking of that important aspect of translating legal knowledge for the consumption of the public. Many of the bloggers in attendance do a fantastic job at that. Just consider how many of the Volokh Conspiracy readers are non-lawyers or other legal professionals. While some attention was given to this aspect in passing (although Larry Ribstein did focus on it more directly), I think the conversation largely ignored the huge impact that legal blogging could have in advancing wider public discourse beyond the walls of the academy - and that such a result would be greatly desirable. The panelists by and large seemed to have a great awareness of how they are perceived within the academy, but generally a much more limited sense of how they were outside it. Although I was impressed by the panelists' humility (because while for me being there was like being in a room full of celebrities, it was probably just as well no one had really internalized that perception) I felt that many of them underestimated the value of their own voice. They were so concerned about the specific substance of their legal posts - and how the academy used it to keep score - that they may have overlooked their general ethos as a blogging persona, which gave them greater reach and influence than they realized.
Written shortly after the colloquium - on 5/2 - but posted 7/9.