first, when you say, “I think of Research as being aimed for an academic audience,” i have to just realize that we are different. i like academic audiences to test ideas but for me research means very little when it doesn’t travel beyond academics. put another way, my best research is that which converses with multiple audiences – academic and non-academic. we differ here i think.

second, too bad your department sees blogs as service. bleh! one of these days, a department is going to wisen up and recognize that – for now – the blogosphere is where the ideas are: more than academic conferences, more than academic journals, more than academic listservs. sharing our research and our teaching and our service via blogs is, for me, one of the most exciting things that has happened recently within academia. last year, in my annual report, i placed blogging under research. yo: “Academic Blogging – My blog affords me academic connections to colleagues, students, and scholarly, artistic, and activist communities. Sometimes, the connections produce professional opportunities such as presentations, publications, and collaborations. Sometimes, the connections produce intellectual opportunities like multi-authored comment threads that further nuance an issue, idea, or interpretation. I enjoy and benefit academically from such connections, and look forward to expanding such activities. Further, I will continue to use my blog to share my research with my students and to share my students’ work with my colleagues.”

As for why not blog about the Official Research things, I think I do sometimes (there are several posts on here about friends, social networks, and the online swedish indie scene), but again, given the diversity of readership, it’s hard to know what balance to strike between stuff that seems nerdy and stuff that’s interesting to all kinds of folks.

It’s not that I don’t think it’s not blogworthy, it’s more that it’s a trick to figure out what people care to read and I don’t want to be too academic on here.

Aspen pix galore on my Flickr page!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nancybaym/

And as for why I’d be more motivated to do one than the other right now, I guess it’s just a question of attention. Blogging is very easy for me. Research, like reading, taking careful notes, crafting careful questions and multi-page arguments to answer them, situating it all in relevant theory, etc is much harder and takes much longer concentrated attention spans.

And no such thing as comments too long except you can’t see them all as you write them!

Your turn!

one of the things i’ve always liked about your blog is the community that visits and comments to it – some academics, some techies, some music people, and lots of swedes! i really like that element of the blog and i think it’s harder than it looks to foster such an audience.

i guess what confused me was that you seemed to be dividing research you do with surveys and interviews from research you do from reading, blogging, and analyzing. to me, both are research, you know?

but here’s my question: why does working on your survey and interview project result in less blogging? why not blog about that research?

obviously, it’s your blahg! but i’m curious about what bloggers consider blogworthy and what is not. i’m especially curious about how many academic bloggers blog about a very narrow segment of their overall lives.

anyways, this comment is too long and i’m worried that it will generate as much if not more confusion than my last comment. hee hee. let’s keep talking about this if you don’t mind.

This blog is kind of a research blog, and one day I hope it will get cut and pasted into a book and articles (that I hope will be great!). But I’m also trying to connect with people who don’t give a hoot about scholarship, people who just might be interested in keeping abreast of interesting trends or hearing what someone who thinks about these things a lot has to say.

So I kind of feel that if my blog audience is ONLY fellow scholars, I’m not doing what I’m out to do. And there are a lot of people reading who are musicians, journalists, business people, fans, etc.

So yeah, in a way it’s a research blog, but I hope it’s not an (overly) academic blog, if that makes sense. Of course, I love that fellow academics read it too, I just want to build some bridges and make some connections to the people engaged in the practical and lived dimensions of these things as well.

the book sounds killer and very necessary – especially if you integrate web 2.0-era stuff into longer discussions of online community and the internet. too many books i see are stuck in listservs or usenet or web sites or – ack! – moo’s and mud’s. we gotta update our intellectual bookmarks to include web 2.0 stuff. that’s what our students use and that’s what they digg. good luck with your many projects.

question, maybe weird: i always assumed your blog was a research blog. i thought you were researching, writing about, and discussing with others fandom 2.0 and music 2.0. yo – i always assumed you were going to cut and paste your blog into articles and a great book. is there even a book on music 2.0?

ps: more pics please!