I’m with PZM. If that’s what you wanted to know, why didn’t you just ask some small* academic bloggers working on small academic projects? I get a steady 12-15 hits a day on my small academic blog**, maybe 20-25 when I actually post something. I got cited by a financial journalist once and got 100/day for about a week, and then it died down again (and I don’t think the post itself made it beyond that one blog). Methodologically, a post saying “I wonder how far this post will spread” isn’t exactly neutral – it’s the next best thing to a Craig Shergold letter (or a Thresher’s offer).

*Five-eight, if you must know. OK, it’s not tall, but still…

**No names, no skyhooks.

Many of these women started blogs. People in yarn shops pointed new knitters to blogs and knitting sites. The knitting blogs I read are, for the most part, older than the equivalent political blogs. Of course, the size of the knits4jesus crowd shouldn’t be underestimated. But knitters are almost always something else (techie/academic/artist) primarily, so knitblogs are a link across many seemingly non-intersecting spheres.

As for its content, I thought the limited reach of my influence would keep the meme in check. But I’m happy I ran the experiment, if only because I can now cite N. Pepperell’s “methodology slam” in my talk. Because if “the new interdisciplinary” means anything, it’s that people outside your tiny corner of academia can now read, evaluate and condemn your work.

John, you can’t test whether success will destroy me—I’ve yet to experience any.

Eszter, would that I could, would that I could. (One day I’ll voice my opposition to the practice of closing lectures to the unenrolled. It’ll be a call to return to the public lecture series, of the weekly sort the British Association once gave. I would attend those in a heartbeat. Instead, we live in a world in which I was asked to leave an undergraduate geology class because humanities graduate students aren’t allowed to sit in on undergraduate science courses.)

UC-Irvine has some great sociologists and I’m sure someone among them teaches a research methods course. I recommend taking such a class if you’re truly interested in improving your skills in this domain.

Nice knowin ya, Scott. Hoser.

One other thing that may have scuttled Kaufman’s hypothesis: this was a meme about spreading information via blogs, and that’s of interest to every blogging category. If he’d gone with something that was a little less universal, maybe he would have seen the spread confined to a smaller niche. No surprise there.

But then, maybe if the academic blogosphere is left to recharge its ….. whatever blogospheres recharge for six months or a year, someone could do this again.

I can see some nice graphs coming out of it.

Had my hypothesis been correct, I wouldn’t have needed a reintroduction to anything, though, as I would’ve been able to count the number of responses on one hand, two tops. My original point, as Scott mentioned, was that despite the blogosphere’s free-wheeling reputation, its academic corners maintain many traditional hierarchies; the only exception being the student/graduate student/professor one, but I think everyone considers that a benefit because it initiates and/or accelerates the professionalization process. (Which would mean, vis-a-vis my overall argument, that interdisciplinary input would be neither more nor less respectable, merely more accessible.)

I’ll just take a noteworthy snippet out of the Methodology Slam post:

I suggested to Scott that he put all of this criticism to productive use at the MLA conference – prove the value of internet academic discussion, by challenging his panel audience to see whether they can come up with as many reasons that his methodology is “crap”. ;-P