Blogging as academic publishing

Prawfsblawg asks (following up a question in my blogging paper) whether blogging should be subsidized.  Maybe, if the private value is less than the social value of blogging, which may be the case.  But how do you determine private value? Measure the satisfaction bloggers get from expressing themselves? More importantly, how do you make sure you don't give the wrong incentives?

Anyway, at least in the law school environment, the issue isn't really direct subsidy of costs (expenses are low, and we waste our time on lots of stuff), but whether we law professors should be paid for blogging in the currency of raises, tenure and promotion. 

The problem is that blogs run the gamut from the really useful and insightful (e.g. my new colleague Larry Solum) to useless navel gazing (I'm not going to fill in that blank).  Of course we already have to evaluate all kinds of publishing. But the point is that traditionally we've relied on student law review editors.  Blogging will force us to come up with new standards and, even, read and judge the stuff for ourselves.

Blogging will not, however, force us to do without intermediaries.  In my blogging article I point out that while anybody can blog, not everybody can get noticed, and this involves making investments in reputation.  Intermediary blogs could, and have, developed (e.g., Solum's), which can serve as the academic filters of the future.

What, then, is the future of student edited law reviews?  In a prior post I defended them along Hayekian lines -- they "let a million flowers bloom." But now blogs can do that, much faster, and without the perversities of the law review selection and editing process we all love to hate.

Yet another thing to ponder about this new medium.