On Law.com, Margaret Schilt has Is the Future of Legal Scholarship in the Blogosphere?. Here is a taste:
Who are the bloggers? The uninitiated might think they would be young professors, those who have grown up with the Internet and are comfortable with self-publication in that format. While there are some of those, the legal blogosphere tends to be populated by midcareer professors who have tenure, are intimately familiar with traditional legal scholarship and see the Internet as a way to reach more readers in a less ritualized format.
Younger scholars, in contrast, debate whether blogging is worth the time taken away from traditional legal scholarship, still necessary for achieving tenure. Tung Yin and Christine Hurt, in an article called "Blogging While Untenured and Other Extreme Sports," write, "Conventional wisdom seems to warn that blogging may be a risky venture for those academic bloggers who have not been awarded tenure and the liberating academic freedom that comes with that award." You may inadvertently offend someone important, you may be -- gasp! -- wrong or you may simply be lured into spending too much time blogging and not enough time creating scholarship and knowledge in the more traditional forms. Blogging, in short, can be addictive. Regular posting to maintain the dialogue and interchange that leads to readership drains time from other pursuits.
Why, then, spend the time? One answer is that a blog reaches far more readers than traditional scholarship. Eugene Volokh said in 2006 that his blog gets about 20,000 unique visitors a day. Readers of traditional law review articles are not counted, but, he says, he's pretty sure that number is very far from 20,000.