Philosopher and blogger Daniel Little observes that “virtually all the new academic publishing I’ve done in these six years began as a couple of posts”:
You might say I’ve become an “open-source” philosopher – as I get new ideas about a topic I develop them through the blog. This means that readers can observe ideas in motion. A good example is the efforts I’ve made in the past year to clarify my thinking about microfoundations and meso-level causation. Another example is the topic of “character,” which I started thinking about after receiving an invitation to contribute to a volume on character and morality; through a handful of posts I arrived at a few new ideas I felt I could offer on the topic. This “design and build” strategy means that there is the possibility of a degree of inconsistency over time, as earlier formulations are challenged by newer versions of the idea. But I think it makes the process of writing a more dynamic one, with lots of room for self-correction and feedback from others.
Jay Ulfelder concurs:
Intellectual work, and science more generally, is not something that occurs in isolation. It is, essentially, a social process. Blogging ideas as you develop them makes the social aspect of intellectual work more explicit and accelerates it. A blog expands the power of the “computer” working on a particular idea by orders of magnitude, and it opens channels to streams of thought that were harder to discover and flowed more slowly when print journals and letters and conferences had to suffice. This expansion doesn’t make every idea turn out better, but it does increase the chances that one will, and it accelerates the process either way.
The Dish 