I am also a father of three, so your point about blogging providing an avenue for writing things in little spaces of time – I am writing this at the kitchen table right now with my five-year old son playing around me – that simply would not be enough for longer writing sessions rings true to me. Better some writing than none.

Also, the writer’s workshop argument is good, as is the blog giving a platform for exploration of broader interests.

Howard S. Becker told the story about how use to go round talking about his research long before starting the actual writing in order to lessen the threshold of academic writing might apply as well to blogging; as we accumulate enough blog posts on a subject, beginning to compose an academic text on it might seem less of an insurmountable task.

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, that pioneer of electronic communication in history of science (I remember being a grad student in the mid-90′s, when not many of us had any substantial web presence, and finding his homepage with good advice), wrote a good post at the Red Herring blog in the spring of 2005 about why we blog. It’s available here thanks to archive.org, (the Red Herring blog seems to have erased older posts for some reason).

Michael

The most remarkable thing is that people still tend to regard blogging as something almost homogenous – regardless of whether you are a 14-year old fashionista or have a professional science blog. There are similarities to be sure, but it reminds me of the early days of writing fiction. A profession deemed so suspicious that the Brontë sisters had to hide their activities from their father initially.

A good summary of the different reasons academics fall into the swamp of online writing, with some very interesting links. Next week I’m holding a seminar at my department where I will try to convince them to organize a collective research blog on the homepage. I’m using you as part of my ammunition (“see – even published authors and respected researchers do it!!!”)

Wish me luck.

I thoroughly enjoy your blog Michael.

Maryann