A mirror to princes bloggers

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Dan Drezner of danieldrezner.com has written a column on scholar-bloggers for the University of Chicago Magazine. It hits especially close to home, considering my recent long disquisitions on intergenerational justice:

When I started blogging, I feared that it would prove a distraction from my scholarly research. What I did not anticipate was that it would actually trigger new research avenues. My interest in offshore outsourcing, for example, started when I posted a few items about it and received impassioned responses. By the time I decided to write an article on the topic for Foreign Affairs, I realized that I had unwittingly completed a fair amount of my research via my blog posts.

Done properly, blogging can be a form of initial research in both the empirical and theoretical realms. Empirically, blogging is similar to clipping news articles or gathering information about a case study. Theoretically, blogging permits one to play with ideas?and even better, to get instant (and candid) feedback from readers. The feedback effect on blogs is much quicker than more traditional presentations of new ideas in academia. Because of these comparative advantages, blogging is seeping into scholarship. Already, footnotes referencing individual blog posts are appearing in both legal opinions and public-policy briefs.

Drezner was among the first academics to take blogs seriously as a legitimate subject of scholarly research. So go read the whole thing, will you?