L’excel.lent blog LSE té una interssant entrada titulada Five minutes with Patrick Dunleavy and Chris Gilson: “Blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now” on reflexiona sobre la conveniència dels blogs acadèmics. M’agrada el títol: el blogging és una de les coses més importants que pot fer ara mateix un acadèmic.
Ara bé… és sostenible? en aquest post es deixa clar: potser els blogs personals no en són, avui en dia…
According to some good estimates, perhaps 80 per cent or more of the single-author blogs on the web are currently inactive, or are ‘desert blogs’ that very rarely updated. And this is because people start them with high hopes, in determinedly individualistic mode, but find that hard to sustain after a while. Coming up with fresh content, day after day or week after week, is hard work for any academic, especially in the current climate where there are so many other demands on people’s time. But if you don’t post regularly, in a rhythm that is clear to readers so they know when to come back, then it can be hard to keep things going.
We don’t think single-author blogs are a sustainable or genuinely useful model for most academics – although all praise to the still many exceptional academics who can manage to keep up the continuous effort involved. By joining together and forming multi-author blogs, academics can mutually reinforce each other’s contributions. We have 350 authors now on BPP, so if they blog with us twice a year we can post two posts a day without too much difficulty (as we do). And there are many synergies – for example, readers who come for a blog on political developments may stay reading for comments on social policy, or constitutional reform. On a multi-author blog, you often benefit from the content that others provide, and they often benefit from yours.
E s proposa doncs que, en lloc de mantenir un blog, de forma heroica, per part d’una sola persona, és millor cooperar i mantenir-lo entre varis. És una mica la nostra experiència al blog CatQuimica.Cat. Però així i tot, com dic des del primer dia en aquest blog Edunomia: Ser blocaire és una de les coses més dures que hi ha en aquest món.