Are law professor blogs like so five minutes ago?

Peter Spiro in this post at OpinioJuris thoughtfully examines whether "the blogging phenomenon may have peaked" in the legal arena, and a terrific set of commentors have enriched the inquiry.  This comment by Dave Hoffman especially caught my attention:

[I]t seems unlikely that law professors (the audience and participants I care about) will continue to blog at high numbers for much longer if (a) institutions don't commit to reward the activity; or (b) it doesn't pay.  Since I think both of these possibilities are long-shots (and the first possibly normatively undesirable) I too see a downward trend in total bloggers.  That doesn't mean that the ones left will die on the vine, just that the gold rush time is at a conclusion.

The "does blogging pay" issue is intriguing because a good number of prominent law professor blogs (e.g., Althouse, Banbridge, the entire Law Prof Blog Network) have ads of some sort.  But I am even more intrigued and troubled by Dave's assertion that it is a "long-shot" and "possibly normatively undesirable" for law schools to commit to reward the activity of law professor blogging.

Of course, I am not suggesting that law schools should reward what I would call "pure pleasure blogging" by law professors (a type of blogging I do on some occasions with colleagues at The Golf Blog).  But, I do think that law schools should reward (and thus incentivize) what I call "scholarship-in-action blogging" for reasons I have explained in this article.  As I explain in my article, there can be so many positive and productive aspects of law professor blogging which can and should dovetail with a law professor's professional goals and the broader missions of law schools.

Perhaps the blog-friendly new Dean of the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville is already thinking about how he should reward blogging faculty.