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As of February 2008, Technorati stated that it is tracking more than 112.8 million blogs, a number which obviously does not include all the 72.82 million Chinese blogs as counted by The China Internet Network Information Center, according to the Blog Herald.

This number is objective, based on who you ask. Does a number really exist of how many blogs there are? Various methods have been used to count the number of blogs, including estimation based on indexing engines from ping services. However, not all bloggers utilize ping services. Consequently, it is difficult to come up with an actual, realistic number.

One hard fact is that new blogs are being published every day. How many? According to Sifry’s Alerts, Technorati is “seeing about 120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day.”

A main purpose to these blogs is to build relationships with a target audience. A recent project that I helped complete is demonstrating just how social media is affecting the landscape of industry.

I have a friend who will earn his Juris Doctorate degree soon. Because the legal profession is highly competitive, it was ideal for Rex Gradeless to become active and develop a lively presence within online communities.

Don’t get me wrong. He is not desperate. He has quite the vita. Working on presidential campaigns, publishing documents in industry journals, and working for one of the nation’s largest law firms all cross his resume.

Gradeless’s quandary is that he wanted to open his availability to a larger audience, but the career placement services at his university seemed to focus on only local opportunities.

As a bit more background, he currently resides in Saint Louis. Gradeless said, “At most law schools the career services office focuses on jobs within the area, but my friend at Harvard gets to walk into his career service office and say where he wants to practice and one phone call later he’s working in Bangkok for 120k/year.”

With the ultimate goal in mind of building a greater reputation and receiving job offers is in his sights.

Of “The Law Student Experiment,” Gradelss said, “I think law students and lawyers can use new social media technologies to better communicate with eachother. This could reshape the way law firms, both large and small, do business… fostering better communication between lawyers and clients (instead of forgetting to return their phone calls).”

Gradeless signed up for a Twitter account (@Rex7) and immediately began building a following of lawyers and social media fans. If you are familiar with Twitter, you are aware of the “retweeting” function. Retweeting is when others who use the service publish the same message that you published, and you get attribution for it. Law professionals across twitter were immediately retweeting posts by Gradeless.

Next up, Gradeless decided that a blog was the way to go. With his blog, SocialMediaLawStudent.com, he is able to write more in-depth entries compared to the twitter service. The blog gives him another platform to publish content and build an audience of potential employers.

How else could his experiment aid with serving as a model? Gradeless said, “It could reshape the way career services offices operate. Maybe each law student will need to create a blog page to market themselves. Hopefully the site will foster communication and the sharing of information among lawyers. Participating in social media dialogue will help those in the profession be better guardians of our laws and protectors of our society.”

He’s on the right track. Will social media work in his favor? It already is. Will it land him a job? Time will tell.

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