An invitation to blog

Dave Karpf posted "On Academic Blogging and Tenure" to his blog. The question addressed is -- should blog posts count toward tenure? His answer was no -- at least not yet?

Dave is smart. He is a friend. I believe the appropriate way to respond to him is to post to my blog. Well, it is not a blog since I do not find the navigation built into blogging very helpful. But it is a blog post nevertheless -- brief, a single point to make. N.B. my only comment on his blog is a reference to this blog post.

As Dave knows very well his position is under substantial attack right now. I love this line

Nobody wants to be told that their business model is obsolete. Ask Kodak. Or Hollywood. And the publishing industry is slower on its feet than most. (Jon Evans)

And the academy is even slower than book publishers. Our business model is obsolete! And the attacks are coming. The New York Times reports (Lin) on the movement away from the old model and gives us this

On Thursday, 450 bloggers, journalists, students, scientists, librarians and programmers will converge on North Carolina State University (and thousands more will join in online) for the sixth annual ScienceOnline conference. Science is moving to a collaborative model, said Bora Zivkovic, a chronobiology blogger who is a founder of the conference, “because it works better in the current ecosystem, in the Web-connected world.”

450 is not exactly a crowd. But it is only one of the new starts they report. There was a piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education that had the temerity to question publication that was read by, at best, a handful of scholars. The author did not think the cost/benefit ratio was very good. [It is just too much work to go back and find it.]

I want to start in a different place. What if we asked how can we best facilitate scholarly communication and the increased knowledge we believe would follow from that given the new media available to us?

Not how are we going to get tenure and promotion. Not how are we going to get our salaries raised? Not how are idiots who inhabit deanships going to be impressed. But how are we going to learn from each other more effectively?

My answer -- we ought to immediately start blogging.

Dave knows better than most of us that blogs were designed as conversation. His research computing the relative influence of political blogs is based on blogrolls and similar techniques for one blog to link to others. They were not self expression aimed at an unknown audience. They were writing aimed at a blogroll. The blogroll listed people I am paying attention to -- whose writing I am reading. From whom I am learning as they report what they are doing. To whom I respond and report what I am doing in the hope that they will learn from my reports.

That was blogging the way Dave Winer did it. That was blogging the way the inventors did it. But it is now hard to find blogrolls on blogs. Blogs have become self expression and not conversation. Or they have become corporate publications -- TechCrunch, ReadWriteWeb, TNW, etc. A return to conversation is why I am commenting on Dave's post with one of my own.

Dave says blogs are not long enough. He says that when he has to write longer he finds inadequacy of one sort or another that needs to be 'fixed.' Notice what he has told us. He has told us he writes having a conversation with himself. Why not let some of the rest of us in on the conversation? We might even suggest some inadequacies that are missed in his internal conversation.

Let me assert -- I would learn more from Dave and other friends working on new media and politics if I was reading what they were learning as they were learning it than if I have to wait for the serious drag that is scholarly publication.

What would we do? We would construct blogrolls. That would be much more useful than 'friends' in Facebook. Since we are academics we could do this in the context of an academic organization [think ITP for those in the know] to have that cover when we are told "it's just a blog."

And we would learn and share what we are learning. I have always thought that was what scholarship was all about.

Please add me to your blogroll -- after your have one, of course. Notice I have a nascent blogroll, but it has only two entries. Send me yours and I will add it to my blogroll.

GRB

Evans, Jon (1/21/2012) Steal This Book, TechCrunch [he is the author of the book he is advocating being stolen]

Karpf, Dave (August, 2011) I am disappointed I cannot cite his latest piece on this research because he has not yet made it into a blog post -- I think.

Lin, Thomas (1/16/2012) 'Open Science' Challenges Journal Tradition with Web Collaboration, New York Times