Many-to-Many post about Academic Blogging : Many-to-Many: Thoughts on Academic Blogging

My comment :

Surely the big problem for academics considering blogging is that academia is viciously competitive, and in general, the system doesn't reward them for it.

If your subject is internet culture or information science, then it's clear how it helps. But if your subject is particle physics then what can a blog do for you?

It doesn't count as a publication. Normal, journal, peer-review isn't about getting feedback, it's about getting publicly acknowledged peer-approval; and blog comments, however smart, don't count.

Nor are they useful sources of information, because you can only cite other validated publications. Of course, they can *point* you to other source material, but a good academic in a specialized field is probably monitoring the few relevant sources anyway.

I'm sure this will change. And I don't believe academics are particularly conservative by nature. But I think they *are* "locked-in" to a publication / career / validation system which is going to be very slow to change.

Hilan, Ron, Tom, Manuel, Jason and the rest of you still in academia invited to comment at this point :-)

ThoughtStorms:AcademiaVsNewMedia