The Ancient World Bloggers Group has a new Metablog (that is a blog about blogging). This is a good case study for the interaction of social networking and digital publishing. The blog, started by Sebastian Heath of Mediterranean Ceramics and the ANS, and Chuck Jones of the Blegen Library derived in part from a Facebook group by the same name.
Most of us will concede that even the most academic blog need not conform to publication standards common to print or even formal online journals. It is nevertheless clear to most of us that there are "good" and "not so good" and "crazy" blogs out there. Participating in a particular social network, through sites like the AWBG, Facebook, and, appearing on the blogroll of other like-minded bloggers provides a kind of evaluative element for blogging as a medium and academic blogging as a genre (inasmuch as academic bloggers tend to share certain characteristics). As a particularly well-conceived case study, one can check out Mark Grimsley's Blog them out of the Stone Age where he has set up a blogroll entitled "A Few Good Blogs". He adds and sometimes takes blogs off this list as they meet certain standards.
I can't guarantee that the blogs on my blog roll won't print something crazy, but, then again, few of us would promise such august standards for even our favorite, most scrupulously peer-reviewed journals.
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