Daniel Drezner has made a good start of considering how blogs may fit in to academic writing. The key issue is the need for peer review. Blogs have comment sections, but there's no way to verify that any of the commenters know what they're talking about.
A really ambitious goal would be to implement a mathematical reputation system that could centrally store blogger/commenter reputation ratings by subject. It would work as such:
1. A blogger writes an entry and selects a subject matter category (and possibly one or more sub-categories). Example: Law -- Intellectual Property
2. A commenter gives the entry a score (and leaves some commentary), and the reputation database stores that scoring instance. Example: Author: John Smith; Rater: Bill Williams; Subject: Law; Sub: Intellectual Property; Score: +1
3. Other commenters may then comment on the original article, or on the comments written about the article. All these ratings are stored in a central database.
4. Here's the fun part. The central reputation server will perform clustering analysis to recognize groups of like-minded scholars (within each subject area), based on their exchange of comments and ratings. By analyzing the patterns of clusters, approvals, and disapprovals, it should be possible to properly weight the comments and ratings of each person involved in the system. That's why it's important to store an entire rating transaction, and not merely the score that's given: the weight of the score will be dependent on the reputation of the one doing the rating (within the subject matter in question).
The reputation system should have several qualities:
1. It should be difficult for a single person to manipulate someone else's reputation significantly in a short period of time.
2. Reputations should change slowly over time.
3. Scores by from raters with high reputations should be weighted much more strongly than those from raters with low reputations. Perhaps exponentially.
4. High scores given between people in the same cluster should count for less than high scores given from outside the cluster.
5. Low scores given between people from different clusters should count for less than low scores given from inside their clusters.
If everyone started at zero, it wouldn't take long to build up a database of scores that accurately reflected the knowledge and experience of the participants. The essential component would be performing proper clustering within each subject area, and getting enough people involved to collect a representative sample.
What if you simply blog for fun and the catharsis of a readily available creative outlet? If I knew I'd be graded, it would steal some of the fun out of it for me.
Well of course, not everyone wants to do acedemic writing. The point is that if such a system could be developed, blogging could eventually replace academic journals.
Ambitious, I know.
I'm not sure whether the ratings would actually reflect quality, or would instead reflect conformance with broadly held beliefs.
To put this another way, could the rating scheme be configured to reflect quality rather than popularity?
I would hope the two factors would have some positive correlation, although a review of my television schedule makes me wonder...
Yes Parker, that's clearly the heart of the issue. That's why the clustering mechanism is important, and will probably be the hardest component to actually build.
Quality should be reflected by high ratings from people with high reputations, whereas ratings from less reputable sources would count for much less.
The reason television sucks is because everyone's opinion counts nearly equally (although there are some prized demographics), and the goal is simply to attract as many eyes as possible.
In contrast, an academic blogger reputation system would be built around maximizing reputation, which would mean pleasing other people with high reputations, not merely the masses.
Of course, this would burden people with new ideas in a field that ran against the establishment, but that's the case in academia already. The point is that the reputation system should reflect the way that real world reputations work, not that it could possibly do better.
The blogs that I enjoy reading the most are those where the writer has disabled comments and disassociated himself from human interaction. I shudder to think what would happen to quality writing, should a person become reliant on public feedback and ratings in order to accomplish his art. Blogging for interactivity may be 'fun', but in my opinion it doesn't equate to producing anything worthy of reading.
Visit BlogScholar to submit your academic blog to the fastest growing directory in academic blogging (also the only one I know of ...). Help build a non-profit resource for everyone.