A few days ago Henry pointed us to the Becker-Posner blog. I see now that they have posted an introductory entry.
Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon. It is a fresh and striking exemplification of Friedrich Hayek’s thesis that knowledge is widely distributed among people and that the challenge to society is to create mechanisms for pooling that knowledge. The powerful mechanism that was the focus of Hayek’s work, as as of economists generally, is the price system (the market). The newest mechanism is the “blogosphere.” There are 4 million blogs. The internet enables the instantaneous pooling (and hence correction, refinement, and amplification) of the ideas and opinions, facts and images, reportage and scholarship, generated by bloggers.
It looks like the blog will have comments, and for now they plan on posting once per week, on Mondays. (According to Technorati the 4 million figure may be a low estimate, the number of blogs tracked is closer to 5 million as of today.)
One issue that keeps coming up regarding academic blogs (that is, blogs by academics) is whether there is any peer review involved. I think the above comment again suggests that there can be valuable post-publication peer review on blogs either through comments or response posts on others’ blogs.
{ 2 comments }
Zed 12.06.04 at 12:47 am
academic, academic, academic, well for some reason I’m going to link to crooked timber, regardless of my feelings for Kant and the over rated idea that academic blogs are better than than non academic blogs. I never read wonkette, but I did see her on c-span recently and I will agree with what she said, – “99.9% of blogs suck”, though there is the rare post and the rare blog worth watching out for, I’m finding it a real challange to create something interesting, and I”m PROUD to be a tech. school drop out!!!!
Alan 12.06.04 at 7:39 am
The introductory sentence “Blogging is a major new social, political, and economic phenomenon.” is all very well, apart from the word “major”. When a blog (I’ll settle for just one) causes a major change in the observable actions of a politically significant number of people, I’ll be impressed. For now, CT and most of the bloggers linked to CT are mainly engaged in impressing each other but have little effect on the rest of the world.
Comments on this entry are closed.