academic bloggers on blogging

Is it wise for academics to blog? Depends on who you ask. Scott Sumner summarizes his first year of blogging this way:

Be careful what you wish for.  Last February 2nd I started this blog with very low expectations.  During the first three weeks most of the comments were from Aaron Jackson and Bill Woolsey.  I knew I wasn’t a good writer, years ago I got a referee report back from an anonymous referee (named McCloskey) who said “if the author had used no commas at all, his use of commas would have been more nearly correct.“  Ouch!  But it was true, others said similar things.  And I was also pretty sure that the content was not of much interest to anyone.

Now my biggest problem is time—I spend 6 to 10 hours a day on the blog, seven days a week.  Several hours are spent responding to reader comments and the rest is spent writing long-winded posts and checking other economics blogs.  And I still miss many blogs that I feel I should be reading. …

Regrets?  I’m pretty fatalistic about things.  I suppose it wasn’t a smart career move to spend so much time on the blog.  If I had ignored my commenters I could have had my manuscript revised by now. …  And I really don’t get any support from Bentley, as far as I know the higher ups don’t even know I have a blog. So I just did 2500 hours of uncompensated labor.

I don’t think Sumner actually regrets blogging (as the rest of his excellent post makes clear), but he does seem to think it’s hurt him professionally in some ways–most notably, because of all the time he spends blogging that he could be doing something else (like revising that manuscript).

Andrew Gelman has a very different take:

I agree with Sethi that Sumner’s post is interesting and captures much of the blogging experience. But I don’t agree with that last bit about it being a bad career move. Or perhaps Sumner was kidding? (It’s notoriously difficult to convey intonation in typed speech.) What exactly is the marginal value of his having a manuscript revised? It’s not like Bentley would be compensating him for that either, right? For someone like Sumner (or, for that matter, Alex Tabarrok or Tyler Cowen or my Columbia colleague Peter Woit), blogging would seem to be an excellent career move, both by giving them and their ideas much wider exposure than they otherwise would’ve had, and also (as Sumner himself notes) by being a convenient way to generate many thousands of words that can be later reworked into a book. This is particularly true of Sumner (more than Tabarrok or Cowen or, for that matter, me) because he tends to write long posts on common themes. (Rajiv Sethi, too, might be able to put together a book or some coherent articles by tying together his recent blog entries.)

Blogging and careers, blogging and careers . . . is blogging ever really bad for an academic career? I don’t know. I imagine that some academics spend lots of time on blogs that nobody reads, and that could definitely be bad for their careers in an opportunity-cost sort of way. Others such as Steven Levitt or Dan Ariely blog in an often-interesting but sometimes careless sort of way. This might be bad for their careers, but quite possibly they’ve reached a level of fame in which this sort of thing can’t really hurt them anymore. And this is fine; such researchers can make useful contributions with their speculations and let the Gelmans and Fungs of the world clean up after them. We each have our role in this food web. … And then of course there are the many many bloggers, academic and otherwise, whose work I assume I would’ve encountered much more rarely were they not blogging.

My own experience falls much more in line with Gelman’s here; my blogging experience has been almost wholly positive. Some of the benefits I’ve found to blogging regularly:

• I’ve had many interesting email exchanges with people that started via a comment on something I wrote, and some of these will likely turn into collaborations at some point in the future.
• I’ve been exposed to lots of interesting things (journal articles, blog posts, datasets, you name it) I wouldn’t have come across otherwise–either via links left in comments or sent by email, or while rooting around the web for things to write about.
• I’ve gotten to publicize and promote my own research, which is always nice. As Gelman points out, it’s easier to learn about other people’s work if those people are actively blogging about it. I think that’s particularly true for people who are just starting out their careers.
• I think blogging has improved both my ability and my willingness to write. By nature, I don’t actually like writing very much, and (like most academics I know) I find writing journal articles particularly unpleasant. Forcing myself to blog (semi-)regularly has instilled a certain discipline about writing that I haven’t always had, and if nothing else, it’s good practice.
• I get to share ideas and findings I find interesting and/or important with other people. This is already what most academics do over drinks at conferences (and I think it’s a really important part of science), and blogging seems like a pretty natural extension.

All this isn’t to say that there aren’t any potential drawbacks to blogging. I think there are at least two important ones. One is the obvious point that, unless you’re blogging anonymously, it’s probably unwise to say things online that you wouldn’t feel comfortable saying in person. So, despite being a class-A jackass pretty critical by nature, I try to discuss things I like as often as things I don’t like–and to keep the tone constructive whenever I do the latter.

The other potential drawback, which both Sumner and Gelman allude to, is the opportunity cost. If you’re spending half of your daylight hours blogging, there’s no question it’s going to have an impact on your academic productivity. But in practice, I don’t think blogging too much is a problem many academic bloggers have. I usually find myself wishing most of the bloggers I read posted more often. In my own case, I almost exclusively blog after around 9 or 10 pm, when I’m no longer capable of doing sustained work on manuscripts anyway (I’m generally at my peak in the late morning and early afternoon). So, for me, blogging has replaced about ten hours a week of book reading/TV watching/web surfing, while leaving the amount of “real” work I do largely unchanged. That’s not really much of a cost, and I might even classify it as another benefit. With the admittedly important caveat that watching less television has made me undeniably useless at trivia night.