Found via Marginal Revolution, this quote sums up the value of (essentially) blogging for yourself in academics:

But the Harvard economist [Dani Rodrik] finds the blog — short for Web log — useful because it serves as a reference catalog for his ideas. “I now constantly Google my own blog for ideas that I knew I had at some point,” he says. “Previously, the ideas would have come and gone. The first good thing is that I have them a little more developed, and, secondly, I can actually recover them.”

Every once in a while I run across a blog that says something like “sorry I haven’t been updating for a while”, which I think entirely misses the point. This blog is meant mostly for myself, as a reference tool for things and ideas I come across. A lot of people wouldn’t consider this to be a true blog because of the sometimes lengthy delays between posting, but the point is to support research in the areas I’m interested in, which can be pretty narrow admittedly.

Walt Crawford has an interesting article in the latest edition of Econtent:

Crawford, W. (2007). The Renascence of the Writer. Econtent, 30(2), 44. Retrieved March 8, 2007, from [Ebscohost] or [WorldCat].

One thesis that I’m working on here is that there is a nascent category of blogging which I’m thinking of as “academic blogging” which can be used by any academic (or anyone for that matter) to advance their careers simply through the act of reading and commentary. Here’s Crawford:

Blogs offer a safe way to get started. There are no expectations,
no grading, no rejection letters. Initially, there may not even be
any readers. You can start with a pseudonym and add your real
name on an About page later, when and if readers appreciate
what you’re doing. You can start with a paragraph on something
of momentary interest, build to a short short story (usually but
not always nonfiction) on something that interests you more—
and possibly progress to a series of linked posts that, taken as
a whole, constitute an essay or story well worth preserving
and expanding.

I agree with that. The barrier to entry for blogging is essentially nil (aside from the costs of time and effort.) But Crawford also brings up an interesting signal-to-noise model that I hadn’t heard of: Sturgeon’s Law where 90% of everything is crud. Interestingly though, he’s using this in a 90:9:1 formulation where 90% is crud, 9% is interesting, and 1% will continue to be published long-term. That sounds about right. But for those of us in academia, I think it’s possible to be a member of both the 90% and 1% clubs at the same time. Just because it’s crud, doesn’t mean I’ll stop writing it.

I’ve been messing around with Yahoo Pipes, and love the concept even though the implementation is a bit clunky. Fascinating project though, and I’m excited for how this will grow. Although I’m not sure about the name, reminds me a little bit about Ted Steven’s Internet Tubes. …

Here’s a pipe that I’ve set up in three stages:

1. The first pipe aggregates book review feeds from the NYT, Washington Post, and several other newspapers from the US and UK.
2. The second pipe searches Technorati for an author based on user input.
3. The third pipe combines the previous two and subsequently searches Technorati for authors reviewed in pipe #1.

These have been brought together in a two-pane html page using rss2html.

Found via Lorcan Dempsey’s blog, I’m looking forward to Zotero‘s public beta, supposedly this Fall ’06. The main problem with any type of academic blogging is the ability to cite articles (like I did with the above blog) even though the link target may be behind a pay firewall of some kind. It stands to reason that services along the lines of Zotero might help make that the process less of a pain. Check out their list of supported sites. Very interesting.