One week and 1300 visitors later, I’m learning a few things about the norms of the blogosphere. An important one is you don’t put your e-mail address on your blog, or you get spammed to death. Another is that if you link to only a few blogs (I had linked to exactly three), rather than dozens of blogs, you get complaints, queries, injured feelings, and so on.

When the law school told me they could set up a blog, it seemed like a good way to separate the news function of the Update Service from more polemical and editorial comments about cognate matters. It also allows me to vent on occasion about things that piss me off to no end, like the Texas Taliban. (The venting may have done some good, as one reader is organizing a petition on the textbook business, for which I’m very grateful.) But the point was not to set up a navel-gazing diary, or to get embroiled in fleeting debates with other bloggers.

I’ve seen about 50 or 60 different blogs, and I had linked to three that had some content. No doubt there are others that I just have never seen. But since I don’t want to spend a lot of time editorializing about other blogs, or explaining to bloggers why I’m not linking to them, I’m just not going to link to any. In any case, I don’t think the three I had linked to needed my links to maintain an appreciative readership.