A couple of weeks ago I recommended George’s Employment Blawg as a valuable resource for workplace ADR specialists. Not that I want to embarrass George (who, by the way, is not just a great blogger but is also a really nice guy), but I do want to call attention once again to George’s blog. Here’s why.

George has an uncanny facility for sniffing out useful web sites. As he reported recently on his blog, George hit paydirt when he discovered HRGopher, a human resources directory listing over 50,000 web sites covering employment and HR issues. Its topics include (dispute resolution practitioners, take note) Arbitration, Mediation & Conflict Management, Diversity in the Workplace, and Labor Relations & Employee Assistance, just to name a few. (Nice work, George–and thanks for sharing your discovery with the rest of us.)

HRGopher should be a valuable resource for anyone who deals with workplace issues, as so many dispute resolution professionals do. (And don’t forget to pay George’s blog a visit.)

Those of us who are mediators know how important confidentiality is to the mediation process, and we endeavor always to honor the privacy of parties.

Privacy is important of course in other contexts, especially when identity theft and security breaches occur so frequently these days (case in point: CitiFinancial’s announcement today that it somehow lost the personal financial data of some 3.9 million customers).

Out of the Box Lawyering, a law blog, recently reported that personal information on virtually anyone in the U.S., including date of birth, address, and home telephone numbers, is available on ZabaSearch, a new search engine. Just type in your name, select the state you reside in, and see what happens. You may be unpleasantly surprised.

This is troubling news for anyone who doesn’t want the whole world to have access to what many of us view as private information (especially anyone who’s been fibbing about their age). For details on how to remove yourself from the ZabaSearch database, visit Snopes.com (yes, the web site devoted to debunking urban legends).

While admittedly this post is most definitely off-topic (despite my good-faith attempt in the beginning to link this to confidentiality in mediation), I figured this was serious enough stuff to warrant sharing with my readers who may not want their personal information spread all across the Internet for everyone to see. Please go ahead and pass this on.

Over the weekend Wisconsin’s Beloit Daily News reported that Rock County Mediation and Family Court Services in Janesville, Wisconsin, has launched a web site for parents. The web site is designed to help parents who live apart through separation, divorce, or other reasons to work together as co-parents and take full advantage of mediation services available in the County.

There is plenty of useful information and materials available here on this web site for parents and for family mediators, even for those who are not residents of Rock County or Wisconsin. Links include:

The Mediation Process, providing information which demystifies the mediation process for parents.

Positive Co-Parenting, with downloadable materials in PDF format on topics ranging from “How Parents Can Cooperate,” “Fair Arguing Rules”, and “Designing a Parenting Plan”.

Suggested Reading, with book recommendations for adults, children, and stepfamilies.

There’s even a sample memorandum of agreement for parenting so parents can get a sense of what a co-parenting agreement might look like and provide ideas for developing their own.

As anyone knows who has had to transact business of any kind with state or county agencies, such offices are typically open weekdays only during normal business hours. However, this web site ensures that support and information remains available 24/7 to parents and children. This online resource could certainly serve as a useful model for any community or county-run mediation program in the process of designing its own family-friendly web site.

The Association for Conflict Resolution’s New England Chapter (NE-ACR) has just announced dates and speakers for its 2005 Annual Regional Conference and Master Class.

The Conference, with the working title of “Pushing the Limits: Conversations for the ADR Community”, is scheduled for Thursday, November 3, 2005, with a Master Class planned for the day before on Wednesday, November 2. This year’s Conference promises an all-star line-up of leaders in the dispute resolution field, so be sure to mark your calendars now.

Robert Benjamin is this year’s Keynote Speaker. Robert is a mediator, past-president of the Academy of Family Mediators, and prolific and controversial author of such articles as “Swindlers, Dealmakers and Mediators: A Brief History of Ethics in Negotiation,” “Mediation as a Subversive Activity,” and “Style Wars And Other Little Hypocrisies,” all available at Mediate.com. Robert will also be conducting a workshop at the Conference which is currently under design.

Douglas Stone, who co-authored the conflict resolution classic Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, lectures at Harvard Law School and is a partner of the Triad Consulting Group, will conduct the Master Class on November 2.

The Conference will be held from 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. on November 3 at the Boston University Corporate Education Center in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, and the Master Class from 1:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m., November 2, at Suffolk University Law School in the heart of downtown Boston.

Requests for proposals for workshops that will be part of the program offerings at this year’s Conference will be going out by the end of this week. Dispute resolution professionals are welcome to submit their ideas for consideration—I’ll provide further details on submission guidelines soon and will make the forms available here for downloading.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted as additional programming and registration information becomes available. Some surprises are planned, so stay tuned.

For more information about the Conference and Master Class, please contact Conference co-chairs Ellen Carno (617-347-0500, ecarno@comcast.net) or Tad Mayer (617-973-9739, Ext. 26, tmayer@mwi.org).

A couple of days ago I published the results of a very informal survey I conducted in an effort to map out the known universe of ADR- and mediation-related blogs.

I turned up with only a handful—a dozen active and inactive ADR blogs.

It turns out that I missed a few, an oversight which I am happily able to correct today. (Hey, I wasn’t kidding when I warned you that my ADR blog survey was both informal and utterly unscientific.)

I am disappointed with myself that I managed to miss a really terrific mediation blog, Florida Mediator, which is “Florida’s first Mediator weblog dedicated to Florida’s Certified Mediators”. This blog is the creation of Perry S. Itkin, a full-time mediator and arbitrator who is also a Certified Provider of Florida Supreme Court mediation certification training programs for Florida Circuit Civil, Family and County Court Mediators. Perry’s blog is loaded with well-written posts, thoughtful commentary, and plenty of information for mediators regardless of what state in the U.S. they happen to practice in. This is one I’ll return to often and will add to the blogroll I’m currently in the process of developing.

I also came across a new addition to ADR blogging, this one from the Netherlands. It’s called Mediationblog.nl: De weblog over Mediation in Nederland (which translates as Mediationblog.nl: The Weblog about Mediation in the Netherlands). Unfortunately I don’t speak Dutch, so I can’t comment on the quality of the postings, but it’s great to be reminded that mediation is a universal language. (I wish though that its domain name didn’t so closely resemble the URL for my own blog–mediationblog.blogspot.com–especially since this Dutch mediation blog is powered by Blogger, just as mine is.) Minor quibbling over domain names aside, I bid “Welkom!” to this blogging mediator from the Netherlands.

Cyberspace, like any world, possesses locations which are vibrant and prosperous. Other sections of cyber real estate are strewn with expired links and abandoned or neglected web sites. Two ADR blogs that I recently came across are examples of this.

For instance, there’s Mike’s ADR (and related) Weblog. Mike, alas, has posted only a handful of times since he started his blog in early 2004, and his blog by all appearances is no longer active.

The same is true of J. Marshall Wolman’s ADR Blog, which describes itself as “[t]he world of Alternative Dispute Resolution brought home to you”. Wolman, who posted sporadically between June 2003 and September 2004, has now, it seems, fallen silent.

A Google search also yielded up two other blogs—or one blog and one newsletter disguised as a blog.

First, the blog. The Mediation Agency, an organization with offices in the U.S. and the U.K., has created an intra-agency blog for use by its mediators, colleagues, and alumni of its training programs, but which is also open to the public. The Mediation Agency Blog, however, which started up in March, 2005, contains only a few posts, the last one from April.

A Fair Way Mediation Center, which is based in San Diego, has a link on its web site directing visitors to its “newsletter & blog”. Once you arrive at that page, there is no blog to peruse, only a message advising visitors that they need to subscribe to the organization’s newsletter to receive updates on its mediation blog. I don’t get it. What I love about blogs is how public and fully accessible they are. Why say you’ve got a blog and then keep it tantalizingly out of ready reach? Why on earth wouldn’t an organization want to make its blog fully available to easily share information and news with the public? (Not to mention what that does for an organization’s search engine rankings.) Well, whatever floats your boat.

Anyway, if I recalculate my ADR blog census figures based on this new data, there are eight active blogs dedicated to ADR; three blogs which include ADR among the topics they cover; four inactive ADR blogs; one intra-agency blog; one blog containing automated feeds for ADR-related stories; and one newsletter-in-blog’s-clothing.

That brings the grand total to 18 ADR blogs.

What follows now is the list so far, arranged by category and alphabetically just to give you a sense of how it all breaks down:

Active ADR Blogs

Campus ADR Tech Blog
http://www.campus-adr.net/weblog.php

Florida Mediator
http://floridamediator.blogspot.com/

Mediationblog.nl
http://www.mediationblog.nl/

Mediation Mensch
http://mediationmensch.blogspot.com/

National Arbitration Forum Blog
http://arbitration-forum.blogspot.com/

ODR News Blog
http://odr.info/

Online Guide to Mediation
http://mediationblog.blogspot.com/

Peace Library News
http://peacelibrary.blogspot.com/

Active Blogs with Frequent ADR-Related Posts

Legal Sanity
http://www.legalsanity.com/

Maine Divorce Law Blog
http://www.mainedivorcelawblog.com/

New Jersey Divorce Blog
http://www.njdivorceblog.typepad.com/

Inactive ADR Blogs

ADR Blog
http://adrblog.blogspot.com/

Conflict Resolution Blog
http://www.conflictresolutionblog.com/

Mike’s ADR (and related) Weblog
http://www.mikeblaw.typepad.com/

The Naked Negotiator Blog
http://www.rbenjamin.com/pg29.cfm

Intra-agency ADR Blog

The Mediation Agency Blog
http://www.mediationagency.com/blog.html

Newsletter in Blog Clothing

A Fair Way Mediation Center Newsletter
http://www.afairway.com/newsletter.php

Automated ADR News Feed Blog

Advocare, A Mediation Resource
http://www.advocare.blogspot.com/

Readers, if you know of an ADR blog I’ve somehow failed to include (maybe one that you yourself publish), please e-mail me at mail [at] mediationnewsonline.com .

To paraphrase the immortal Bill Haley, there’s a whole lotta blogging goin’ on.

If you require proof, consider Technorati, a leading weblog search engine, which as of today’s count tracks some 10,743,320 blogs. I also refer you to a research study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which was released in January, 2005, and reports these astonishing statistics:

8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs.

(And that’s just here in the U.S. The mind boggles at the amount of blogging that must be taking place around the rest of the world.)

According to the Technorati web site, new blogs are created at the rate of one every 2.2 seconds, or approximately 38,000 new blogs each day. Bloggers as a group produce some half a million posts daily.

That’s a lot of blogs and a lot of bloggers.

While blogs have clearly emerged as a hugely popular phenomenon, sadly, however, according to the Pew study, “62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.”

This unfortunately seems to be the case in the ADR world, where blogging remains virtually unknown (a marked contrast with the legal community, where blogging has caught on like wildfire).

Curious about the status of ADR blogging, I conducted an impromptu census of alternative dispute resolution and mediation-related blogs. What I learned is that blogging remains uncharted territory in the conflict resolution world. Even the Harvard Program on Negotiation maintains no mediation blog (at least none that I could find on their web site). Indeed, very few active ADR blogs exist at all.

What follows are the results of my admittedly informal and largely unscientific study of the status of blogging in the alternative dispute resolution field.

The very best, and one of my very favorite all-time blogs, is the Campus-ADR Tech Blog, edited by Bill Warters. Warters posts on tools, resources, web sites, and news for those who work with conflict in higher education, as well as for mediators, trainers and others whose interest in conflict extends beyond the university setting. This blog is part of the impressively well-organized Campus Conflict Resolution Resources Project at Wayne State University.

One of the oldest ADR blogs is the Center for Information Technology and Dispute Resolution’s ODR News Blog, which can be found on the home page of the CITDR web site. As you might guess from its title, this blog provides news and analysis of issues involving the online dispute resolution field. Postings are well written and informative, and focus on cutting-edge trends and technology.

The Peace Library at the Centre for Conflict Resolution based in Capetown, South Africa, publishes a blog, Peace Library News, which has a focus on conflict resolution in Africa. This blog, which was first published on January 28, 2005, is a relative newcomer to the blogging community, and offers unique links to publications and articles not typically found on more familiar sites such as Mediate.com.

There are three other active blogs that are dedicated solely to ADR.

One, of course, is yours truly, Online Guide to Mediation. I began posting on January 12 of this year, so this blog is a relatively recent addition to the blogosphere. As far as I know, mine is the first and only ADR blog to have been allotted an ISSN number by the Library of Congress. It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the first continuously published, woman-owned and –published ADR blog in North America and perhaps even the world.

Another active blog with an exclusively ADR focus is Mediation Mensch, the brand-new creation of author and workplace dispute resolution expert Dina Beach Lynch. Mediation Mensch is an online resource for the ADR entrepreneur who is looking for business and marketing strategies and tips, along with a little friendly encouragement.

The remaining active ADR-focused blog is The National Arbitration Forum Blog published by the National Arbitration Forum. This blog covers news on arbitration as well as other types of dispute resolution processes.

There are other blogs which do not have an ADR focus but which often fold the subject of conflict resolution into their posts. These include Arnie Herz’s Legal Sanity. Herz is an attorney and mediator who bucks the status quo by creating a resource that “aims to counter the growing problem of lawyer discontent by providing practical information, ideas and advice on remaking the everyday practice of law to achieve optimal outcomes, professional and personal success and work-life balance.” This encompasses publishing posts on nontraditional practices such as mediation. (For a great example of his craft, please see his May 31 post, Lawyers in Mediation.) While this bears no influence on my decision to include his blog in this post, I should say that Herz included a link to an article I wrote for Mediate.com on how to choose a basic mediation training (although, alas, he didn’t credit me by name.)

Two other law blogs which from time to time include information and perspectives on mediation and other ADR practices are Charles Abut’s New Jersey Divorce, and the Maine Divorce Law Blog. Both of these address family and divorce law issues in their respective states.

Although it’s not an active blog and contains only a single posting which is several months old, I do want to mention somewhere in here Robert Benjamin’s The Naked Negotiator Blog. I’m hoping that someone as subversive as Robert doesn’t allow his blog to languish for much longer. Anyone who writes articles with titles like Guerilla Mediation: The Use of Warfare Strategies in the Management of Conflict or The Mediator as Moralist Bully is capable of great blogging. (Hey, Robert, how about it?)

My list is technically complete, but my conscience nags me. I confess: there remain two blogs I have neglected to mention so far.

One of these had but a day-long life span, but its title was so well optimized that it continues to attract the attention of search engines. This was the ADR, Mediation, Arbitration & Conflict Resolution Blog, which consists of a single post published on January 11, 2005. It’s too bad, because the premise on which this blog rested held much potential.

The second blog I have been reluctant to mention is published by a group called Advocare (an organization for which little information is currently available on the Internet—its primary web site is currently under construction). Despite the fact that Advocare’s blog advertises itself as the “Weblog for everything about Conflict Resolution, Negotiation, Dispute Resolution, Online Communications, Technology News and much more”, this blog contains virtually no original content, analysis, or commentary about ADR. The lion’s share of its content consists of automated news feeds. (In the opinion of this humble blogger, this doesn’t seem to count as true blogging.)

Looking at the overall picture of the status of ADR blogs currently, there are six active blogs dedicated to some aspect of alternative dispute resolution; three blogs which are not strictly ADR blogs but whose content from time to time includes dispute resolution topics; two inactive ADR blogs; and one blog containing automated feeds for ADR-related stories. That’s 12 in all–a surprisingly low number for a field that is growing and becoming increasingly visible all the time. I certainly hope that changes in time as ADR professionals come to recognize the benefits of blogging in the way that attorneys and others have, and that we see more original blogging from our ADR colleagues.

Thus concludes the Online Guide to Mediation Unofficial Survey of Alternative Dispute Resolution Blogs. Readers, if I have neglected to mention a web site that properly belongs on this list of alternative dispute resolution blogs, assist me in correcting this oversight. I welcome your comments, which can be sent to me at mail [at] mediationnewsonline.com.

I will be sure to include your submissions, with proper attribution, in an upcoming post. Many thanks to you all.