You’re hurting me. Put me down please.

My friend Ed Schipul (here on Twitter) told me about five months ago that I was going to have to start Twittering at some point. Join the conversation he said.  This immediately reminded me of line from the movie Die Hard:

“Come out to the coast, we’ll get together, have a few laughs…”

See, I’m a writer and publisher by profession, and although I spend a considerable amount of time thinking about my industry, I have avoided joining the great debate on the interwebs for the usual reasons: it’s all noise, too much time, no obvious benefits, blah, blah, blah. Nevertheless, I put the excuses aside and joined Twitter (you can find me here) and started following a few folks, and then a few more, and few more after that.  Then I came across a tweet about Adrian Lurssen’s list of 145 lawyers to follow on Twitter (now up to 736 as of 5/26/09), and a quick search found another link of big law on Twitter, and another site that’s simply a feed of what lawyers are twittering.  So I started following some of those folks.

Turns out, when you get into following people, you’re thrown off a cliff into the middle of some rushing rapids.  This reminded me of yet another line, this one from a classic Bugs & Daffy cartoon:

“You’re hurting me. Put me down please.”

As soon as I got in, I wanted to get out.  But I calmed down after a few days of learning some of the tools of the trade (e.g., Tweetie works best for me on the iPhone, and Tweetdeck does a good job of reorganizing folks into groups once you get a handle on the kinds of topics each person posts).  With these I’ve gotten better at organizing posts relevant to my thoughts about the law, and the future of legal publishing in particular, and keeping quick tabs on certain twitterers of interest.  (I’ll compile a list in a separate post.)  This in turn has actually lead me to more specific and relevant information, in a way that my RSS feeds weren’t. It is also one of the great things about Twitter. [Note: For a terrific (and humorous) summary of why a lawyer might want to be on Twitter, see Charon QC's post here.]

Along the way a curious thing happened. The social aspect of Twitter, and the ensuing online discussions, made me want to blog. The 140-character limit, while great, is too limiting if you want to speak to a point more thoroughly. And because I’m not a blogger, there really wasn’t much of an outlet other than comments to other posts, which have their own limits as well (e.g., moderation).  So that explains this blog, or at least why I’m doing it.

One other thing. There are plenty of great new media law content publishers out there on blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed, etc., linking and talking about the future of legal publishing, but I haven’t seen many old media publishers doing it.  Not that they aren’t using blogs to brand, market, and distribute valuable content, it’s just that most old media companies (with the possible exception of Thomson West) aren’t speaking directly to the issue of the intersection of old and new media.  Interestingly, I did find Bill Pollak, the CEO of North American operations for Incisive Media (they own Law.com among others) on Twitter here.  He’s participating in the discussion, and blogging about some of it.

If you happen to know of any old line publishers out there blogging about this stuff, please drop me a line or a link in the comments.

See you around the tubes.