Blogging and scholarly productivity

There is a suggestion in the article linked in my post on the Drezner tenure denial that blogging reflects negatively on an academic blogger’s productivity.  Obviously that shouldn’t be an issue for the tenure committee, because all they should care about is the record, not whether the candidate could have done more.  But how should bloggers themselves assess the impact of blogging on their scholarship? I believe my productivity has increased since I began blogging.  But was blogging the cause? 

(1) There is the question of how much time blogging takes away from scholarship.  The subtraction is not the total time spent on blogging, but (a) blogging time that doesn’t contribute to scholarship -- much of the reading I do for my blog I would do for my scholarship or classes in any event; and (b) time that otherwise would be spent on scholarship. 

(2) Time spent on blogging contributes in several ways to the quantity and quality of my output: as a kind of “warmup” exercise to make all my writing faster and more fluent; as a way of focusing my thinking about what I read; because it’s hard for me to think productively without writing things down; and because the interaction with readers and other bloggers helps enrich and sharpen my ideas. 

(3) Productivity includes, in my opinion, impact.  Writing for circular files placed in offices all over the country is not very productive.  My blog advertises my articles.  Some might view this as crass self-promotion, but then they misunderstand the role of advertising generally.  I’m not just publicizing my work, but showing how it addresses the interests and needs of my readers.  No abstract can even adequately summarize a work, let alone show the various ways the work intersects with other ideas.

(4)  The above points apply even if blogging itself is not regarded as scholarship.  But some blogging is a form of scholarship that I think will be increasingly recognized as such.

The above implies that blogging is more productive if it fits with the blogger’s “day job.” As discussed in my Law and Economics of Blogging, bloggers comprise an army of specialists whose knowledge fills the gaps left by media that need bigger markets to survive.

For these reasons, among many others, I’m convinced blogging will emerge as an important part of every academic’s life.

Comments

[MT]

I agree fully, but don't forget to meet and talk to real peers. I'm not an academic blogger, so I don't actually know this, but I suspect you get fewer smart questions in absolute terms, as well as of course in percentage terms. So you might get lulled. But I do agree with what you said:I think explaining your ideas to absolutely anybody makes them better, and I think less of academics who aren't ready to summarize an idea or who seem unable to draw an analogy to anything else to explain something to you.