One of the big questions for academics engaged in blogging is whether and how blogs should count towards measures of academic output, like traditional journal articles and book chapters. The obvious answer is to write journal articles and book chapters about blogging. Uses of Blogs edited by Axel Bruns and Joanne Jacobs is the first edited collection of scholarly articles on blogging (at least so the blurb says, and I don’t know of any others), and includes a chapter from me on economics blogs. With the book coming out of QUT, there’s a strong Brisbane flavour including chapters from Mark Bahnisch (who’s already posted on this and Jean Burgess ditto.
I’ve only had time to dip into a few chapters so far, but it looks very interesting and the opening chapter by Axel and Joanne is available free
John Quiggin 
Uses of Blogs…
John Quiggin reports on a new book containing scholarly articles on blogging. One use I’ve found in teaching is to ditch my old clunky content management system and just use WordPress to manage all the web content for my courses…….
John, Is your article online somewhere?
I’ll post it when I get a moment
Juan Cole had a good post on this july25th. He had missed out on a job at Yale (or was it Harvard?) and colleagues sugested his controversial Informed Comment could be the reason. His response was excellent:
Henry David Thoreau refused to pay the poll tax put in to support the immoral American-Mexican War, and was sentenced to a night in jail. His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson came to visit him and asked him “David, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “What are you doing out there?”
Here’s that link.
Cole also linked to a Chronicle of Higher Education forum, “Can Blogging Derail your Career?”
Bottom line:
Being in the middle of all this, trying to help mutual understanding, is what I trained for. Should I have been silent, published only years later in stolid academic prose in journals locked up in a handful of research libraries? And this for the sake of a “career”? The role of the public intellectual is my career. And it is a hell of a career. I recommend it.
I wish there were more academics – and politicians – with such altruistic moral fibre!