Reading Time: 5 minutes
I have been blogging for awhile, decades at this point. This blog has the word “exploration” in its title but, really, it may be more about experimenting. One thing about experiments is that you may not see them bear fruit for a long time, if ever. Or you may get results you don’t anticipate. That was what has happened now that the Hein publishing company has entered into an agreement with Lexblog to re-syndicate blogs in the Lexblog universe. Including this one.
I’m not really sure what to say about the arrangement. I mean, great, of course, if you like reading blogs by people adjacent to the law or legal profession. You might have done that before on Lexblog itself. Or used their co-branded ABA Journal / Lexblog American Legal Blogger site, which is a similar content collection. Both seem to hold fewer authors/publishers, which may reflect the difference between which blogs are active and which aren’t. Lexblog has a longer publisher list.
The publication timing is a bit different too. Both Lexblog and Hein seem to have the same content, with a delay that I put down to processing rather than embargo. Here is Lexblog:
and American Legal Blogger, captured the same day:
and the Hein integration:
It’s a pretty neat arrangement. Lexblog sends out its harvesters, which I can see coming in on my website log files even if they don’t trigger a website analytic visit. Their probably headless agent comes in over the RSS feed and grabs the latest content. It gets exfiltrated back to the Lexblog platform, the featured image gets dropped, and the content is put into position.
It’s more of a scrape than anything. For example, I have a plugin that adds a notional reading time to the blog. That is embedded on the Lexblog pages where it appears on this blog. There doesn’t appear to be any additional curation although, since Lexblog is a WordPress site and so is this one (and so, for that matter, is HeinOnline.com), maybe it makes the transition easier.
The contents are the same too, although not as extensive as what I have on my own site. There are 382 posts now ingested by Lexblog and visible on HeinOnline. The oldest one is from March 2019. I must have decided to throw my feed into their ring about that time.
The HeinOnline tie up makes sense. Lexblog has a lot of cruft as it archives old content. My blog used to be listed under the Law Library heading but it’s now under Technology and AI. If you click through to that channel on Lexblog, the “latest” posts are from 2023 and 2020 and so on. On the page that my blog is visible on the channel side, the blogs above it have last published dates from 2018, 2019, and 2025. About half have a post from 2026.
For someone who is browsing the site, the content age issue would mean that it could be hit or miss as far as utility. It makes sense to me that a site that relies on search, like HeinOnline, is partnered up with the content. It is much more likely that someone will surface a relevant blog post through search than through browsing. Browsing also only gives you the very top layer of what may be much deeper content archives. There is a search on Lexblog but it seems pretty basic. If someone were trying to pull in both practical legal materials like ABA journals or texts as well as blog posts, the HeinOnline interface will bring more things together with a more powerful search.
Needless to say, I had no idea that I’d see my posts on HeinOnline. It was a bit of a shot in the dark to submit my feed to Lexblog for inclusion. Since I make my content available for free anyway, it hardly has a downside. It has been very rare to see someone click through from Lexblog to one of my posts, so either they’re not being read at all or they are only being read on the platform.
I have been wondering about whether there is a way to build in some sort of tracker to provide view data from within HeinOnline. Unlike the typical web analytics, subscription viewers would be hard numbers. I’m also curious to see if HeinOnline users are more likely to click on the source link that allows them to go to the original. On Lexblog, that link goes to the original publisher’s website (here). On HeinOnline, that link goes to Lexblog, which provides stability but provides the publisher / author no analytics nor does it provide the authoritative content.
For example, I posted about 18 months ago about cancelling our Bloomberg Law contract at the law school where I work. After publication, Bloomberg people contacted me with vague “our lawyers say” threats. So I temporarily edited the blog post to reflect that I was complying, although I then FOIA’d my own contracts and republished the original data and additional data about my legal publishing contracts.
Here is the post as it appears today on HeinOnline via Lexblog. It is the way the original blog post looked, as captured by the scraper.
Here is the post as it appears today on this website. Notice the bold section that explains the back and forth about the image, the slightly different image, and so on.
So the risk of intermediating the content for Lexblog but also for researchers using the integration on HeinOnline is that what they see may not be what is actually there. Lexblog is a snapshot. I infrequently will update a blog post after the fact, although I have never entirely deleted a published post of any consequence.
In a sense, the HeinOnline tie up would make more sense if Hein took Lexblog’s curated list and scraped and indexed it themselves. They could then return the latest version of the content directly. On the other hand, there is a lot of maintenance to consider when dealing with a herd of legal cats publishing individually across the web. I could imagine a lot of 404s and 503s and websites that just disappear. Lexblog’s role will be to provide some sense of archival persistence, even if the content isn’t entirely current. Also, my perspective of Hein is that they aren’t a content manager like that; they are themselves a container of stuff, and better to have stuff to contain than to try to whack-a-mole a bunch of blog posts.
There’s some good archival content there to be sure. Lexblog stepped into the gap when the Law Professor Blog network failed last autumn. They were able to keep a pretty solid flow of content even through all of that transition and there are more than 200,000 blog posts included in that channel alone.
Not everybody made that move so some of the Law Professor blogs are now running on their own hook. Ann Lipton and her crew at Business Law Professors blog had already dropped Typepad and they are hooked into the Lexblog feed. Kevin O’Keefe’s name is in their site metadata too so, even though it has a Law Professor Blog LBP logo, I wonder if it is a Lexblog hosted blog. Sentencing Law and Policy went solo after the LBP debacle and it makes me think trying to hook some of those authors back in would be worth the effort, even if they are not strictly part of the Lexblog collection. One of our faculty, Alberto Bernabe, does not seem to have been on Law Professor Blogs or Lexblog but still cranks out torts-related posts on Blogger. #OldSchoolRespect
All of which is to say, the Lexblog collection is curated but it has gaps that would be nice to see roped into the collection. Not their circus, not their monkeys.
I was a bit cheeky and asked if the HeinOnline folks would scope in my 380+ blog posts into my author profile. I mean, if they’re good enough to include as a collection of content, then perhaps they’re good enough to be measured in other ways; like goofy clout chasing citation counts. Since I know my blog has been cited in scholarly articles, it would be interesting to see if that loop was closed.
You can just never tell where an experiment will take you. I get enormous pleasure just writing this stuff. The idea that it would be read, syndicated, possibly included in a valuable collection (although I felt personally chafed that it is included for free by Hein: I feel a bit devalued as a writer (LOL) although I applaud the decision as someone who has to pay for Hein). It also is, dare I say it, a bit of a breach in the wall for blogs to be considered as anything consequential. YOU know they are. I know they are. But there are some folks who clutch some very specific genres tight to themselves who may start to see relevant blog posts in their search retrieval merely because they are now aggregated in a way that makes them easier for those people to find.