They should all become blogs! Immediately!!

Er, maybe not though, and I’m not taking an absolute position on this and honestly not involved enough in that space to know all the ins and outs. But I can see that blogging is still considered “out” by people who desperately want it to be in.

Case in point is this enormous and weighty discussion thread going on over at Harvard Business Review’s new want-to-be-a-blog-but-not-quite-ready site, HBRgreen.org. (h/t Shannon at Triple Pundit)

Have you ever seen a group of professionals invest so much time and energy into debating HBR content?

The HBR thread is perhaps of interest to anyone managing or planning for an academic journal. By now most people are aware of blogs though many hold deep misconceptions about who uses the internet and how. It’s also true that print journals deliver a loaded experience; it’s easy to conflate that experience with ideas about credibility, respectability and seriousness. There are merits in the print format and I don’t recommend anyone completely abandon that approach. I’m NOT suggesting a “wisdom of the crowds” play for academia in general. Not likely that.

Simply observing that everyone in academia agrees on the theoretical benefits of a healthy discourse, yet print journals (like some blogs) are notorious for leading readers into an unhealthy echo-chamber of ideas… The important difference being the size and dynamic nature of that chamber, as even a tiny blog community can generate greater diversity of informed perspective than an established and highly edited journal.

More importantly, making content available for some type of threaded discussion is a great way to engage and interact with a community of smart people. If I was designing a journal, I’d design it to engage the largest, most active, and best informed community possible.

PS: Who am I to pronounce the merits of blogs – I whom art too lazy to enable comments? I’m not an academic journal (one), trackbacks are enabled (two), and if you don’t know what trackbacks are, google is still your friend (three). Plus, I’ve got email, send me a note…

[tags]Academic Journals, Ideas, Blogs, Communication[/tags]