Blogs and Contact

Press coverage of weblogs centers on the posts and on the audience: what's written, and how many people read?

One terrific rôle of the weblog is that it's a rich personal placeholder, an easily-located place where others may find a reflection of your work and interests. This has already proved invaluable twice today, and it’s still too early for breakfast.

• Weblogs help locate the some of the best people in nearly any field. Some of them have weblogs. Others are discussed in weblogs. In well-known and well established areas, this is merely convenient, but in new fields (where there may be lots of cranks and where there hasn't been time for people to publish and receive reviews and recognition) it’s invaluable.
• Weblogs let experts find you. Better still, weblogs let them discover that you need stuff that they happen to know. This gives scholars terrific leverage: it’s nice to put new ideas in a journal where hundreds of your colleagues can find them, and it’s nice to publish them in a weblog that thousands of people read, but you can’t beat the efficiency of sending the idea directly to the worker who needs it. And in this case it’s just as good to give as to receive.

All this occurs off the page, outside the window. It’s almost invisible, but I think it’s terribly important to the way our blogosphere actually works.