On November 4th some colleagues and I held a conversation about blogs with Bob Stein. Bob is the founder of the Voyager media books company and Nightkitchen software and is currently heading up the Institute for the Future of the Book. The conversation covered many topics, but the early discussion centered around blogs, journalism, economics, and the academy. I took away from the conversation a feel, perhaps angst, that the blogosphere by virtue of its Internet base and journalistic ties is struggling to deal with commercial and economic interests. (For what is, to my mind, a scary primer on the commercialization of blogging, see J. D. Lasica's "Influence Peddling in the Blogosphere".)

One tension in our discussion centered around the ways that blogging can be configured as a professional activity. As blogging moves from a personal to a professional writing mode, what models can be put in place to support it? How might free market or commercial models such as advertising-supported funding alter the spirit of blogging? How do folksonomies and attention economies alter familiar commercial models? How can or should the academy subsidize professional blogging? Are there alternative models such as cooperatives that might sustain and extend blogging?

A good bit of our discussion also focused on tensions wrought by blogging that might be felt particularly by academics. We worried about losing proven models of editorial control but noted the evolving self correcting nature of blogging and its communities of knowledge. We wondered about the impact of the severely compressed time to production for blog writing. And we thought about the concerns raised by the forms of blog writing and about aspects of academic culture that determine how knowledge is created and counted.

I have compiled some of the conversation into a podcast covering blogs, economics, and the academy. The segments of the discussion included in the podcast treat some of the concerns sketched out above. It shouldn't be too surprising upon listening to the podcast to learn that our conversation touched on these issues, but served less to provide solid answers and more to open questions.