Out there

When I sat down on Jarvis Field today, in a spot carefully chosen to put myself in the sunshine and my laptop screen in the shade, I expected to spend the two hours and change between classes getting started on the video I'm making with the at-risk teens from my Community Action project. Instead, I got completely wrapped up in something I barely knew existed before: the law student blogosphere.

As you may have learned from the comment on my last post, a site called ClearAdmit has nominated me for their Best of Blogging competition this year. Of course I'm really flattered, because while I'd never heard of the site before, who knows how many other people have. And because ClearAdmit has apparently been mentioning me for months in their Fridays from the Frontline feature, who knows how many of them have gone on to visit this site. (Welcome, guys!)

Since nominees (and only nominees, sorry fans) are invited to vote in this thing, I decided to glance through the other nominated blogs and try to make some semblance of an informed decision. This quickly turned into more than a glance, because the more I read and realized that these were real people who might really appreciate the recognition, the more I cared.

It was crazy to discover this whole community whose edges I've apparently skirted for months. What better reminder that there are people everywhere, not just at Harvard, going through the same things I am than posts like this one from IDWSJ, expressing exactly the same feelings I had about friendships my 1L year? But I was also startled to see myself on the "blogroll" of a couple of the sites. Are real Internet strangers out there reading this thing???

And if so, should that mean something for my conception of this blog? On the one hand, not really. If somebody else thinks the content is good, I'm thrilled, but my first priority is still to keep family and close friends up to date on the parts of my life they would care about. On the other hand, this does change a thing or two. Realizing how many people might actually read this, for example, I should probably think carefully about whose names and pictures I use here.

I've drawn no real conclusions yet, especially with finals looming and a huge video project to undertake and plenty left to wrap up with TAP and my journal. But I'm definitely setting up a Google Alert on myself, and I should probably look into a hit counter.... Suggestions?