Hobby-blogging

By the time I made it back home from the Harvard blogging conference via Washington, I discovered that everybody had blogged on the bloggers talking about and blogging about blogging.  Law student Ian Best does his usual great job summarizing the summaries.

I will dive in with a modest observation about the conference's major theme, is blogging scholarship?  Answer: Of course.

But I do have a concern about what I will call here "hobby-blogging" -- opinions, reflections and reactions that don't relate to any of our professorial tasks. 

My concern is that there will be pressure from two directions to, in effect, professionally legitimize these blogs by giving their authors credit in retention, promotion and compensation.

First, entertaining blogs get more downloads, recognition, higher USNWR rankings, etc. Might we be heading for the day when the dean tells the faculty, don't bother with with the law reviews; work on your movie reviews? 

Second, scholarship, as Randy Barnett pointed out at the conference, is hard work. So is a lot of blogging (e.g., Larry Solum’s).  But hobby-blogging is fun. Though at the end of the day, we get a lot of satisfaction out of good scholarship, we might be tempted, before the end of the day, to substitute hobby-blogging for scholarship, particularly if our schools reward us for doing that.

I'm concerned, therefore, not about hobby-blogging itself, but that blurring the line between hobby and work may have negative consequences for our work as scholars. After all, incentives matter.

All of this interacts with general opposition we can expect from scholars to giving institutional credit for any blogging. They might think, if you've mastered the 100-page law review article, why should you get shouldered aside by some lightweight who can write punchy sentences?  The absence of clear standards for awarding professional credit for blogging will only fuel this opposition.

Academic bloggers can best respond by addressing the legitimate concerns of the anti-bloggers. They should therefore unite behind the following principle: scholarship, including marketing our scholarship to the broader community (see my paper for the conference) should get credit, based on merit, whether or not it’s on a blog; but hobbies should get no credit, whether or not they lead to downloads.

Another thought is that bloggers could assist this evaluation process by clearly separating their hobby-blogging and professional-blogging.  I have been decreasing my hobby-blogging overall because of the concerns expressed in this post.  I'm thinking about starting a separate blog to free me to do more general interest stuff.

Comments?

Update:  I didn't notice that my colleague Larry Solum had a similar suggestion about separation, with which I fully agree. My comments above should be viewed as additional and complementary arguments for this approach. Here's Eric Muller's thoughts.

Comments

[Marc Hodak]

I'm not sure what you mean by your "hobby-blogging" because all I see is law and Morgenson related stuff. Do you mean your movie comments?

[Larry E. Ribstein]

I have significantly reduced my "hobby-blogging" over the last year or so. What I meant in my post is that I might get back to it, but only if moved to a separate blog.

[Marc Hodak]

Thanks for clarifying.