Bloggership

D. Gordon Smith of the University of Wisconsin Law School prepared an interesting essay on 'bloggership' for the Harvard conference on blogging last April, exploring the potential of blogging as a scholarly medium.

"Blogging encourages individual research and reflection, and its public nature provides an opportunity for scholarly activity that is similar in many ways to presenting at an academic conference or publishing an editorial article. Bloggership is a useful neologism that distinguishes this sort of scholarship from traditional, long-form scholarship and it distinguishes blogging that has scholarly aspirations from other forms of blogging. If scholarship is about making a contribution to knowledge, and the receptacle for that contribution is a scholarly community, then blogs seem well positioned to serve as delivery mechanisms."