Nigh-related guests

“Kerim Friedman”:http://keywords.oxus.net/archives/000405.html has an interesting idea; rather than inviting guest-bloggers to come on board for a period of a week or so (as we and the Volokhs do) he’s inviting academics to come on board for just one post, a mini-essay on some topical subject. As he says:

bq. Often I’ll see academics post short statements on professional e-mail lists which I feel deserve wider attention, or I’ll see news story on a topic which I know someone else would handle better than myself. Unfortunately, many of my efforts in this direction are in vain, since most academics aren’t yet comfortable with the format of a blog. The idea of rapidly responding to current events, or popularizing a specific idea without the extensive preparation and editing that goes into a published article scares a lot of scholars – not to mention the fact that they are just too busy.

It’s an interesting way of getting academics to dip their toes in the blogosphere, and I imagine it will be attractive to a lot of people. Most professors have more ideas rattling around in their head than they’ll ever be able to write up in articles. As Brian “says”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/tar/Archives/002558.html, blogging is a nice way to play with ideas that you think are interesting, but that you’ll never have time to develop properly, or even just to help flesh out a thought that’s still in its early stages. Even if most academics don’t want to start their own blog, I imagine that a fair few of them wouldn’t mind hiving off their excess ideas by posting occasionally on somebody else’s. It’ll be interesting to see how Kerim’s experiment works out (not that I think we’ll be moving that way ourselves anytime soon).