Cooped Up has given up the ghost. It pains me to hear the author of that blog say that his blogging has damaged rather than enhanced both his "scholarly profile" and his "scholarly productivity." I pray that other law professor bloggers will not suffer the same fate.My aims are somewhat different from the aims of the author of Cooped Up. This may be partly or largely because I am older. I view my blogging mainly as a source of entertainment and as a source of inspiration. I have no delusions that most of my colleagues at my law school or in wider legal circles think that blogging is a worthwhile activity. But in general I am not trying to reach them, my peers in the legal world. I do want to reach and hear from people outside of the circle of my professional peers. (I hasten to add that it is also always a genuine pleasure to hear from my peers in the legal profession.)
Yes, blogging sometimes is a time-consuming activity (though much depends on how -- how often etc. -- it is done). Withal, the true question is whether the rewards are worth the investment; and that is a question that each blogger must weigh and answer individually.
I am happy to report to my blog has generated some very interesting e-mail. And I have always enjoyed blogging. (This is surely because I have always followed the rule that I blog only when I want to do so.) So I will keep at this blogging business a while longer -- but, as before, only sporadically.
1 comment:
Let me say that I read your weblog and other prof's weblogs often... I find your weblog good entertainment and food for thought.
As a preliminary guess I would say that some working intellectuals will be able to use weblogs as part of their creative process and others will find it distracting or debilitating.
Recently I went to the Darwin exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. What I found best about the exhibit was the account of Darwin's working methods. It was a revelation to see the small index card sized notebooks, labeled by number. It occurred to me that Darwin gathered evidence a paragraph at a time.
It happened that at the same time I was reading Nietzsche's Twilight of the Idols. It seemed to me that Nietzsche would have made the perfect weblogger.
The reason I bring up these two disparate examples is because creative people have different ways of gathering their thoughts. Darwin, with his sense of privacy would have made a lousy weblogger but the way he thought was actually in weblog sized entries. On the other hand I think Nietzsche would have made a great weblogger and by the evidence of most of his writings he simply thought in weblog sized entries....
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