Snuck over to visit Jenny from the Blog this afternoon, who stumbled last night onto a page listing "Professors Who Blog." Saw the page a couple of weeks ago as a link off of Barclay Barrios's dissertation/site, The Subtle Knife.
Since I can't comment on Jenny's site, despite the monthly fee of $19.99 I might add, here's my $.02 (perhaps my September payment can be credited, JHE?):
I don't want to get all Shirky or Weinberger about this, but we specifically shouldn't be sending our links to that list. The quicker it passes into obsolesence, the better. The slick thing about the blogosphere--a word that hasn't quite penetrated into my comfort vocabulary yet--is that, faced with overwhelming possibilities of linkage, we make more conscious choices and encourage visitors to glide associatively along the sites that we choose. I don't want there to be only 1 or 2 degrees of separation between cgbvb and most of the stuff on that list. For all that I am both, I don't want to be one of a random, alphabetized set of "professors who blog." At least not until they change the name to "Academia's Bloggiest Home Pages," and ask Bob Saget to host...
This stuff, once I've thought it through more carefully, may end up in an essay or chapter someday, but it seems to me that the kind of motivated, associational linking that we do here is more promising/productive than an alphabetical list of links or even the mostly-dumb results we get out of a search engine. Part of what I get when I cruise Steven Johnson's site is a set of sites that have little in common other than his endorsement, but there's a better chance that I'll find interesting stuff far more quickly from his site than I will from Google. And this phenomenon stands a better chance of capitalizing on the associative power of linking than perhaps first-wave hypertexts ever did.
Yeah, I know this is more answer than you were looking for at 4 in the morning, but idle blogs are the academic's playground...
C,
I really do agree about the linking thing. I was just joking about sending your blog link into this list. There's something so...I don't know....corny about it. Maybe I should have a smarter comment, but I don't. I like blogs specifically because they're so banal, so ephemeral. They're like finding little interesting notes at the bus stop that someone left behind (like what Found Magazine or Royal Journal publish). My favorite blog entries aren't indexical, important, or significant. We get enough of all those things every day. Why this attempt to index the ephemeral?
Oh, I know you were kidding--I can't help but wax a little didactic sometimes. But you didn't respond to the most important part of the post. Do my 2 cents get credited against my monthly fee for September?