(via Bryan Alexander) The Village Voice offers a pretty interesting piece on blogging in academia, including quotes from my hero.
“I’ve published a bunch of articles in law reviews, and I think I’ve gotten maybe a total of 10 letters about them in the history of my career as an academic,” he says. “I publish stuff on the blog, I get literally hundreds of e-mails about things all the time.”
It’s a wonderful thing.
But here is the blogging (the verb) quote, from six-year (!) blogger Josh Kortbein:
I write my blog because I wish that things were different, and I’m thinking about how to make them that way.
That feels right from where I sit, too. Blogs as platform. That’s what blogging is…
I think that most people equate blogs and blogging. TMFTML recently write this on his blog (http://www.popfactor.com/tmftml/archives/001984.html) “I’ve been thinking lately about blogging; more specifically, what the f**k is it for? And, to start, I think we need to identify our terms. Every article you’ve seen in the news lately about bloggers refers specifically to a certain subset of bloggers: Let’s call them polibloggers.” When people hear the word blog (or blogger or blogging) this is what flashes through their mind.
It’s not going to be easy to change public opinion (talk to Kleenex or Xerox about their desires regaring names), so perhaps we need to find a better word for the sort of blogging you advocate.
I agree. Nominations anyone?