Monday, June 02, 2003

"SCHOLAR BLOGGERS":

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article about academics who blog:

"Scholars Who Blog
The soapbox of the digital age draws a crowd of academics"

(via The Volokh Conspiracy)

By DAVID GLENN

Is this a revolution in academic discourse, or is it CB radio?

[�]

Will the practice of blogging become near-universal in academe? Or is it, as the Invisible Adjunct sometimes imagines, "a temporary trend that will run its course"? Mr. Balkin notes that blogging, like many other phenomena on the World Wide Web, is organized according to a power law. That is, the most popular nodes, like Instapundit, tend to have 10 times more readers than blogs on the next tier, who in turn have 10 times more readers than the third tier. "Is that distribution going to stay fixed?" he asks. "The answer is that we don't know how fluid this economy will be. I would be amazed if in two years' time you went to look at the list of most popular blogs, that the list will be the same -- but it will probably still be organized as a power law."

[�]


Hmmm� I guess if Instapundit is first tier, by these critieria PaleoJudaica.com is about fifth tier. Oh well. If my loyal readers want this blog to continue in the long run (and I am planning on keeping it going at least in the short run), the best things you can do are, first, keep visiting; second, link to it on your web pages if you have them; and, third, tell your friends and colleagues about it and get them to visit and to link to it. It also doesn't hurt any to send me items of interest you run across on the Internet.

There will also be a live chat session with Eugene Volokh on academic weblogging on June 4 (1 p.m. Eastern Time).

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