A fellow new to me, one Bruce Marcus (a self-described former Upper West Sider, I hasten to add, as well as someone with an enviable first name), alerted me to a post of his about the impact of legal blogs:

"Aside from political blogs, few areas have produced more interesting, valuable and sophisticated material than the legal profession. You have only to look at the growing number of blogs for and by lawyers to realize that the massive power of law bloggers can ultimately influence the law itself, and certainly its practice.  Law firm blogs report on techniques of practice management, practice news, practice gossip and practice techniques. Led by a long list of pioneers, such as Monica Bay (The Common Scold), The Volokh Conspiracy, Andy Havens, Dennis Kennedy, Bruce MacEwen, Larry Bodine, Jerry Lawson, Sabrina I. Pacifici, Robert Ambrogi, and many others, the network of law bloggers has blossomed."

Excuse me while I finish blushing.

To my mind, and I'm confident Marcus would agree, the impact of blogs—particularly in knowledge-intensive domains such as the law itself, management of law firms, and practice group management—stems from their spontaneous creation of a distributed network of wisdom and knowledge. 

And, unlike in the world of "MSM" (mainstream media), a Darwinian competition enforces a discipline upon content, meaning that cant, obfuscation, and insincerity will be rejected and ignored, and that thoughtfulness, a felicitous tone of voice, and critical insight will rise to the top. Put more simply, if The New York Times has a bad day, I'll still read it tomorrow; but if a blog disappoints, there are plenty more where it came from.

Proof that this "distributed intelligence" is a genuine phenomenon was "Rathergate," where a powerful array of arcane specialties (the fontography of 1970's-era IBM Selectrics, for example) spontaneously assembled to deal a blow to the august CBS News division.  I wonder when or if there may be such a seminal event in law-land.