Blogs make the material accessible to more people–and the quality can be high even if the form is informal–so I think academic blogging is a good thing, with our without a social network to go with it.

Most magazine and journal articles are better researched, better written than blog posts… so why read inferior material? Why do I still bother with my blog when I could get (potentially) more lasting readership, prestige and money by writing books and research articles?

The short answer is that I want to connect with others at a personal level. Research articles and magazines do not allow it. Blogging is engaging because it allows me integrate an informal social network…

I totally agree that comments add a lot of value to blogs, but saying that people can’t write good articles without them is somewhat rude.

I actually did not even think about the comments when I wrote the term “social network”. Some very well connected bloggers do not even accept comments on their blogs!

Compare this to an article in a printed magazine. Does the quality of the article get worse by the fact that you can’t read other people’s thoughts on it directly? Or how about a book?

I read and publish research articles. It is sometimes a very satisfying experience. But there is more to life.

Some of my colleagues go to conferences all the time, where they connect with others. I found that I prefer blogging for this purpose.

I think this is a very harsh statement. I totally agree that comments add a lot of value to blogs, but saying that people can’t write good articles without them is somewhat rude. I guess it depends on what you are writing about and why you are doing it in the first place, but if someone delivers quality content that I find useful, I will read it regardless of how many comments it has, or doesn’t have. If the post is bad I probably won’t bother to read the comments anyway. The fact that a lot of people read something does not make it good.

Compare this to an article in a printed magazine. Does the quality of the article get worse by the fact that you can’t read other people’s thoughts on it directly? Or how about a book? Comments add value, but I disagree that not having them reduces value.

Of course, having a lot of “friends” in the blogsphere will help you get new readers and expose your thoughts and ideas to a wider audience, but if you write about things people want to read about, and your material has decent quality, people will hopefully find it anyway. Personally I prefer feedback from people who read what I write because they are interested in the topic and not because they know me or because I linked to their blog.

For example, I don’t know you, but what you wrote did interest me enough to make me think about it and take the time to write a reply.

I did a qualitative study of blogging, and my strongest finding is: blogging is a form of community!

There is some kind of weird mojo that I could stumble upon a blog post that echos what I’ve just written 65 pages about.

On the other hand, the efforts of the bloggers are also very valuable to other third-parties- e.g. for products branding – as I mentioned in my blog post earlier.

Anyway, I have just increased your links capital, by making a few links to some of your posts.

Couldn’t agree more… aggregating blogs through planets (planetplanet.org), makes things more interesting!
Has somebody put together a planet for academic blogs – that’ll surely be a lot of help!