By way of Debra Cassens Weiss at the ABA Journal, I learned of David Lat’s Project Truman Show. Lat is known among legal bloggers as author of the legal gossip blog Above the Law, where he often delves into other people’s private moments. But via his personal blog, he is now promising to expose his own weighty matters and belly up to the privacy bar — and I mean that literally. As he undertakes a regimen to shed pounds, he promises to track his progress every evening on his blog, complete with daily shirtless photos of his (shrinking?) belly.

But Lat is by no means the first to post daily belly pix on the Web. One of the “offbeat” sites I showed at the 2004 60 Sites in 60 Minutes presentation at ABA TechShow was John Stone Fitness, the Web site of a man who, like Lat, decided to get in shape and post daily photos of his progress, from pot-bellied slouch to lean, mean fitness machine.

So while David Lat will not be the first to expose his body-fat ratio for the world to see online, he probably will be the first lawyer to do so.

Photo of Bob Ambrogi Bob Ambrogi

Bob is a lawyer, veteran legal journalist, and award-winning blogger and podcaster. In 2011, he was named to the inaugural Fastcase 50, honoring “the law’s smartest, most courageous innovators, techies, visionaries and leaders.” Earlier in his career, he was editor-in-chief of several legal publications, including The National Law Journal, and editorial director of ALM’s Litigation Services Division.