Academic blogging thoughts continued

I wanted to include here a segment from the first post of another blog project I am planning to work on in the future that documents a lot of my ideas about academic blogging and contains a significant number of links to sites/blogs/articles that address some of the issues central to the discussion around using blogs for academic purposes. The excerpt, in it's original context here, follows:

I feel like blogging will continue to be important for me, at least while I'm in school and maybe even particularly once I'm out in the world working. I know some people say that blogs are meaningless drabble and worthless, but I think that they are a really exciting tool that allows nearly immediate and virtually free access to various forms of knowledge produced not just by those in our immediate geographical/academic/traditional social communities, but actually worldwide. I also recently found out that there are projects to collect this knowledge and organize/legitimize it for general and academic use. There are certainly problems that exist for blogging academically including: academic refereeing (peer-review) and reliability/verifiability/legitimacy as a source and issues of plagiarism (particularly because of potential differences in copyright law since there is not an official international law) and citation both for the blogger and those who want to use its content. Even just in that set of links about academic blogging, a fair number of them are blogs and, regardless of whether the moderators are said to be librarians or college students, it is almost impossible to know for a fact who is actually producing the ideas and words because of the lack of a definite connection between an actual and an online identity. And even then, all these thoughts are tied into traditional systems of valuing information which are constantly under scrutiny and revision.

That concludes the excerpt. I think this post is really important, because as I've been working on this blog for my independent study, I've realized that I have had to do as much research on utilizing this medium for academic purposes as I have actually gotten to research my initial topic.