What makes an academic blog “academic”?

Tonight’s thoughts are brought to you via a post by Ashley over at gnovis on the topic of information overload and blogging. We can all relate to Ashley’s thoughts. You fire up your blog, you throw your thoughts out into the interwebs, and before you know it you are part of a “revolutionary cultural movement” that seems sometimes to be moving, well, nowhere. You are latest victim of that increasingly popular topic: information overload (See Robot Foot and the recent NYT article).

Ashley confessed that the internet had become “something that has stopped [her] own creativity.” But where Ashley has started a new blog project as an answer to information overload, Brad, gnovis’ editor, posted a comment stating that he felt like the standards we set for posts have turned blogging into something of a chore. I can certainly relate to that. A little blog deamon sits on my shoulder all of the time, reminding me that “someone else has probably covered it.” That is probably true in the world of tech, and certainly in politics. Put the two together… and, well, pack your bags and go home. (Today I wanted to write about the DC Twitter feud, only to find that the Huffington Post had already got it, and, err, that it was 2 months old).

But what about academia? Ashley’s post, and Brad’s comment stirred some thoughts that have been lurking in an unpublished format, somewhere in my brain for several months now. Simply asked, what makes a blog “academic”? Compared to the rest of the blog-o-sphere, is academia a different beast? Does it exist outside of the information stream that can overload us? After all, it isn’t as driven by the news.

And so, Ashley, Brad (anyone!) I have a question: How high is the “bar” for an “academic blog”? Like you both, I am busy and can get overwhelmed. On my blog I want to write something important, I don’t want to be an internet aggregate, but much like my term papers, I feel that I have to present loads of contextualizing information to convey my simple points. When these articles do make it to the web, they resemble mini-essays more than a normal blog post. They sometimes feel monolithic, standing their in their digitalized form.

Yet, I also think the most productive academic work I engage in is actually via conversation. Robert Scoble is famous for describing blogs as “a conversation.” You come as you are, for better or worse, and participate in a community that shares a common interest. Surveying the academic blog-o-sphere, we seem to be skittish about recording these conversations in any public space. This is a bit disheartening. After all, couldn’t academia benifit from the same ideological underpinnings as open-source software? Wouldn’t collaborative, open, and frequently flawed (but quickly corrected!) work more effectively serve the academic community and the public for whom we are obligated to serve?

If, as Brad put it, blogging is about finding (and sharing) a voice, maybe we should stop checking for misspelled words and just click “Publish” already.