blogs and expertise

(Comments are based on an email I sent out recently to COMM 566 alums at Cornell)

I came across a blog post on the Economist that might be germane to our class discussions on how to build and maintain a technical blog.

The discussion of the blog's role in policy formation takes off from Obama's comments, quoted in a NYTimes article on efforts to reach out to moderates in the Taliban. He says the following about the use of blogs as a source for policy ideas on the economy:

“Part of the reason we don’t spend a lot of time looking at blogs,” he said, “is because if you haven’t looked at it very carefully, then you may be under the impression that somehow there’s a clean answer one way or another — well, you just nationalize all the banks, or you just leave them alone and they’ll be fine.”

Besides the irony in its title (banks aren't a paragon of stability right now) and understated British wit, the post points out the potential advantage blogs might have in discussing complicated issues. Unlike news articles and op-eds, it's not constrained by column space and the circulation's audience. Unlike academic papers, ideas can be generated and commented upon in real-time (perhaps the original impetus of arXiv, especially it's - now defunct? - blog feature).

The chief barrier seems to be in quality - how to aggregate good ideas without restricting dialogue. This problem seems partially addressed by expertise, either on the experienced journalistic side (as the author suggests) or on the academic side (assuming a very flexible department and brave assistant prof).

A good example I've found of the latter is Follow the Money, a Council on Foreign Relations blog on trade flows, managed by Brad Setser. I've got no idea how he manages to generate as much content as he does; it might be easier for a research group with multiple contributors. Since new content is important to sustaining regular viewership, multiple contributors might help to avoid trading quality for quantity, or becoming an aggregator blog (if undesirable).

Haven't thought about this extensively, but I hope it helps with your respective projects.