We noted last week that Dan Solove at Concurring Opinions has updated his Law Professor Blogger Census and reports that there are now 235 law professor bloggers at 100 law schools; 24.7% of the law professor bloggers are female and 75.3% are male. In our Law Professor Blogs Network, we have 41 law professor bloggers (17.4% of the total); 29.3% of our law professor bloggers are female and 70.7% are male; and 17.1% are persons of color.

Dan Markel notes today on PrawfsBlawg that:

[T]hese stats seem inflated on a couple dimensions. Don’t get me wrong: I’m certain they are accurate in that Dan S. has dutifully reported all the information reasonably available to him. But I fear they are misleading in that various people (men and women) who are listed as bloggers are barely blogging, and certain blogs have relatively very few posts, and usually those blogs, and many others on the list, have very few readers.

[W]e should be cautious and not try to overstate the amount of enthusiasm out there for prawf blawging. It’s a wonderful thing that more people are writing for audiences beyond law reviews and opeds. And for the most part, I am bullish on prawf blawging’s future. But the growth of blogging by law profs is not, I submit, as robust as an uncritical view of the Solove Census suggests.

Dan M. notes that we are going to explore the future of the law prof blogosphere at our conference at Harvard Law School on April 28, 2006:  Bloggership: How Blogs Are Transforming Legal Scholarship.  The conference is free and open to the public.

Dan S. has a detailed reply to Dan M. here; he notes:

I agree with a lot of what Markel writes. In my census, I do not look at the frequency at which a law professor blogs, so ones who post only once in a blue moon are still counted. I adopt this policy because I don’t want to create some rule for how frequently one has to post to be deemed an "active" blogger. Nor do I have time to check to see how often folks are blogging. So Markel is right — my census is limited in that it is basically a head count.