Do not fear the blog

On Cafe Apocalypsis, Alan Bandy mentions an excellent response to Ivan Tribble article previously mentioned. It is in the Chronicle of Higher Education today:

Do Not Fear the Blog
By REBECCA A. GOETZ

. . . . I blog first and foremost because it is downright fun to participate in an emerging media form. Blogs and the blogosphere are new concepts, and the possibilities for scholarly communication are endless and exciting. Because I blog I now have contacts, online and offline, with a variety of scholars inside and outside my field. They don't particularly care that my dissertation is not yet done; the typical hierarchies of the ivory tower break down in the blogosphere so that even graduate students can be public intellectuals of a kind.

Professor Tribble lamented that blogs are not peer-reviewed and wrote that that was one reason why their content was illegitimate. While it is true that the author of a blog decides what she publishes on her blog, she does not blog in a vacuum. Other bloggers can -- and do! -- react to faulty logic or misinformation. . . . .

There's more good sense in every line of the article than there is in either Ivan Tribble's initial article, or his follow up They Shoot Messengers, Don't They? (2 September) put together.