As I’m thinking about this, I probably should be qualifying things a bit more. I am talking about the use of blogs in academia, which is still largely frowned upon. I don’t think that what I’m saying applies to all bloggers; just those who want their ideas to be taken seriously within academia.

But you are right, perhaps blogging should try not to emulate current academic conventions. Maybe to do so will be an attempt to make it into something it isn’t.

Here’s a utopian idea though: in class we talked about the scenario of an academic journal: a writer submits his/her material, peers review it, and the editorial team publishes it. In the blogging world, the article is published, and the peer review process that once was veiled from public eyes is now in the open. This by nature would turn academics into more of a conversation.

Tell me if I’m getting your point here, but it seems you want to raise the respectability of blogging by making it use more scholarly approaches.

I’m not so sure that will happen — in fact I’m sure it won’t — but what I think we have to face is that whether we like it or not blogging will become an emerging authority because of its accessibility. Some professors don’t like that students use Wikipedia, but its availability will mean students will consult it.

Asking folks to cite evidence is asking blogging to become academic; again, I’m not sure that will happen. Blogging is informal by nature and conversational in approach, rather than academic, detached, and evidentiary.

Just my thoughts.