Today marks the 4th year Cruise Law has been on Twitter. Check out our page here. Over 10,000 tweets and over 10,000 followers later, it has been a fun four years. Tweeting is just micro-blogging in 140 characters and led me to create this blog Cruise Law News.
If you are not on Twitter
Today CNN asked me to write an opinion piece regarding the state of affairs of the cruise industry following the fire aboard the Carnival Triumph. CNN permits only the first 150 words of the article to be published so here you go:
Editor’s note: James M. Walker is a maritime lawyer and cruise safety
A few minutes ago, Cruise Law News hit a milestone with the 25,000th person "liking" our page on facebook.
For the longest time, our involvement with social media involved mostly this blog and our feed on Twitter, CruiseLaw.
What I have observed this year is that our Twitter feed (with over 10,000
According to AVVO which ranks the popularity of law blogs, Cruise Law News (CLN) is currently the 9th most popular law blog in the U.S. You can read the list (updated daily) here. The list does not pretend to be a compilation of the "best" blogs. It is based primarily on the number of readers
A couple of my friends on Twitter asked me about a maritime law blog in Miami which tweets under the Twitter handle @cruiseshiplaw. They were confused whether it was my blog, because it looked strikingly just like mine and had a similar name.
I clicked on the blog and, yes, it looks pretty much just
Yesterday I mentioned our blog’s three year anniversary. I was pleased to receive some positive comments back from our readers, particularly on our facebook page. Here is one comment that I received via email from a travel agent which I thought was nice:
"Congratulations on three very successful, provocative, educational and to say the
This month marks the three year anniversary of my blog, Cruise Law News ("CLN").
I started this blog in September 2009 with the goal of writing about "everything the cruise lines don’t want you to know." There has been a lot to write about.
Shipboard rapes. Molestation of children. Mistreatment of foreign crew members. Overboard
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One of the things about being a maritime lawyer in Miami is that when a cruise ship catches on fire or sinks, the networks will come calling for you to appear on TV.
The cruise lines usually run and hide until the drama is over. But the Miami based maritime lawyers will appear on
Cruise Law News has been on line since September 2009. We have several thousand people who subscribed via e-mail, RSS or Google Reader. A little over !0,000 people have followed us on Twitter over the last three years. Most of the subscribers and Twitter followers are from the U.S. with many travel agents, cruise planners
I received a nice compliment this week when a top travel blogger, Chris Owen, picked Cruise Law News as one of "Three Unique Cruise Websites Worth A Look."
Chris is a popular travel expert who writes for Gadling and his own blog Chris Cruises – Inside Cruise Vacatioms."
Chris writes:
"There are
People ask me why I practice "cruise law." My answer? It’s the most exciting type of law practice possible, like being in a movie – except it’s the real world with real people.
Consider the news in the world of cruising this year.
A showboating and debonair Italian captain runs a $500 million luxury cruise
The Daily Business Review released "Top Verdicts & Settlements" for last year. You can click on the digital version here.
We obtained the highest award in an admiralty / maritime case in Florida in 2011. The case involved an injured crew member from Royal Caribbean’s Jewel of the Seas who the cruise line sent
There has been a lot of news lately about cruise ship disasters, like ship fires, groundings and sinkings. But the most likely danger that a passenger, woman or child, faces during a cruise is rape.
Cruise ships are essentially floating cities. Increasingly larger floating cities at that. Like any city, a cruise ship has crime.
When I created Cruise Law News back in September 2009, my goal was to raise awareness of safety issues on cruise ships. I wanted my articles to be interesting and, perhaps, provocative in order to spark debate about the cruise industry with the goal of making cruising safer for both passengers and crew.
Back then
The Miami Herald reports today that Florida’s cruise ports are booming.
A report from the Florida Ports Council shows that Florida leads the nation in cruise operations. 13.5 million passengers embarked on cruises leaving Florida in 2011. This figure accounts for 60 percent of all U.S. cruise embarkations.
The combination of the Port of Miami, Port
After publishing Cruise Law News for the past two and one-half years, I decided to create a second blog: "Maritime Lawyer." It will cover maritime issues and events which don’t involve cruise ships. I registered MaritimeLawyer.com long, long ago and will be using that domain for the new blog.
My friends at LexBlog
One of the interesting things about having a website or blog is that it is easy to see how many people are clicking on your site and reading your stuff.
Google Analytics is an easy (and free) program that lets me see how many people visit Cruise Law News, how long they stay and how
I returned to Miami from Washington DC this afternoon after attending the cruise safety hearings convened in the House of Representatives and the Senate this week.
These hearings were the sixth and seventh Congressional hearings regarding the issue of cruise ship dangers I have attended since 2005.
I met my friends and former clients in
