A digital archive though – a presentation of one’s research – is a far greater contribution – by the mere fact of substance alone.

My reticence about the traditional mode of public-scholarship is that it is dependent on media which must pay attention to word-limits, attractiveness to the audience, appeal etc. My case in point, heck, my shining example, is Niall Ferguson [about whom you can read further on CM]. There is a lot more that Ferguson can do with a digital archive than he can do with an op-ed.

Thanks though, for your comments, everyone. Lots for me to think through.

This is a blog entry in an ongoing blog, one that updates fairly regularly (it’s bookmarked in my del.icio.us)… I think it’s unfair to expect someone voicing opinions such as these to, in the same place, put up some sort of content-hosting web 2.0 application right there.

Blogging has less cultural capital than publishing, still, certainly, but it’s a cheap, easy way to get your ideas out into the aether. Search-engine spiders love blogs, because they’re highly hyperlinked… the idea behind the word “blogosphere” deserves some attention. An idea that gets out into a blog that others are reading tends to create a “cloud” of interlinked blog articles… these then generate further readership by drawing in from each blog’s periphery– the readership that doesn’t fall in the Venn diagram of two blog’s readerships…

Overall, it’s just a single article by someone who is hoping to create a public presence for himself. It’s linked to this class’s page, which is linked to all of Prof P’s other class’s pages, the blogs that are attached to each of those classes, and it’s also linked to many of our blogs. Suddenly, as spiders pass through, we’re building this guy “Google juice” as this happens– and a certain amount of residual juice trickles down to our blogs, too.

All this widens the pool to a group that’s larger than just, say, those who have access to and read a certain scholarly journal.

It’s easy to forget, when you’re blogging like we are for this class, that blogging is in fact a very public act. Do you read the visitor stats on your blog? You might be surprised how many people end up on your page from seemingly-random Google searches.

Overall, though, the guy did something public in publishing a blog, and ended up getting read by a PhD level class at a school halfway across the country– not bad for someone who, according to his bio, still hasn’t completed his PhD.

Personally, because of the public nature of all this, I try to always remind myself that the assignments in the classes that require blogs are at least potentially profile-raising (for better or for worse.)

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It’s interesting that you mentioned flickr, though– it’s another thing, like blogging, that’s democratizing access to production…

A friend of mine just paid half her rent with a picture on her flickr account that got picked up by Newsweek online.

As you note, blogging (even these humble entries) is opening our efforts to a wider audience. I wonder if we’re just preaching to the choir, though.

Bill