“Silos are computer networks that are walled off from everything else. Your ideas can go in there, they make that easy, even enticing, but they can’t interact with ideas anywhere else. Ideas that can’t interact are fairly useless.”
This from the inventor of blogging, Dave Winer aptly describing where most legal publishing historically has gone.
Into silos, at the enticement of large legal publishers, law journals, law reviews and trade/association periodicals
Much has been ego driven. Here’s my article in the National Law Journal. Here’s my law review article in a law school’s law review.
Some rankings driven for law schools. Here’s the professors who have written for law reviews.
All of these places are silos controlled by publishers. Only their chosen legal thinkers get in, only thoughts that are purchased can get out, only paid subscribers of the publications participate in the legal discussion – assuming subscribers do so.
Like software, the advancement of the law takes place much faster when the law is open.
Look at the law today, as compared to twenty-five years. Most of the legal insight and commentary, today, is published on blogs.
Blogs are open to the world, regularly cited by other blogs and shared across social media.
Information, thoughts and ideas are moving openly and quickly. Gone are the silos, for most legal contributors.
Continuing to publish your legal ideas to silos may render your ideas fairly useless.