Comments on: Blog Posts: Conversation or Publication?

By: atopian.org

atopian.org — Wed, 11 Jan 2006 12:08:18 +0000

Blogging and academia

Ironic, that the day after I write what is probably the most mindless comment yet on this site, Crooked Timber brings up the subject of academic blogging once more.

continues below the fold..

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 16:16:22 +0000

I’m with John that its a new thing. It’s pretty clear that TSA toys or pink bunnies aren’t in the same class as real analysis, but that we mix them in because we crave more readers its fun.

What if there were an easy way to mark articles as “This is new thinking that’s worthy of professional notice?”

Perhaps it would be worth having a journal comprised of blog posts? Or a meta-journal. It would be pretty easy to set up such a thing using Del.icio.us.

By: John Armstrong

John Armstrong — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 07:18:12 +0000

As I mentioned in passing in my latest comment on Editing the Blogosphere, I believe it’s essential to treat new media as new things and not simply try to shoehorn them into one analogy or another. It seems that you agree that blogs are neither publication nor conversation, but hold similarities with both.

I think that blogs run the gamut between the two ends, and no one answer can suffice. I read (and respond to) posts more formally here than I would to the average post on someone’s LiveJournal site, but more freely and conversationally than I would in a letter to the hypothetical editor. There’s room for both styles, even within the same blog.

Unfortunately, this very variance makes the question all the more difficult, and difficult questions in their early, amorphous stages like this I tend to find are better discussed at Koffee? or over a pint or three at Anna Liffey’s than at the sporadic pace of a comment thread.

Side question: does the lifestyle of a legal academic allow for the freewheeling cafe/salon discussions that other academics enjoy?