Interesting article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on following a newly appointed tenure-track academic through the challenges of starting an academic career and blogging.

"Then, on October 17, like the smiles of the title character in the Robert Browning poem "My Last Duchess," Gwynn's blog stopped altogether. As Gwynn told me in an e-mail interview, she had become crushed under her new responsibilities and wanted to reserve her intellectual energy for her students, rather than for her cyberspace readers. Her teaching load was just two courses, both in Renaissance poetry and prose, but she had 100 students in those courses and, hence, lots and lots of papers to grade."

Well we knew it was never going to be a cakewalk. Now a short reference to the potential troubles of unleashing distributed, unfiltered communications in the form of blogs. Provost Peter Lange at Duke University writes from a personal experience to staff about some of the key free speech issues to be considered. It's all about the control baby.

"As we all are aware blogs and email have “democratized” communication; anyone with access to a computer can get in the game as writer or spectator. In many ways this is a very good thing, for it reduces the elitism of “publication” and the control of opinion by opinion “sellers”. Nonetheless, this “democracy” is also permissive of saying almost anything, about almost anyone or anything, using any language, no matter how distasteful, disrespectful or dismissive. We can spread our ideas faster, and without the mediation of others, but we can also control neither their dispersion nor the nature and distribution of reactions to them. In fact, if those reactions distort the account of what we have said, there is likely no way to correct the record for the large number of people who may have secondarily received those distorted interpretations. "

Lawrence Ferlinghetti was arrested and later acquitted on obscenity charges when he published Allen Ginsberg's Howl in 1956 as founder of San Francisco's City Lights Bookstore. Later he spoke of literature: "The future of publishing lies with the small and medium presses". Ten years later John Fowles wrote in The Magus:  "I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope - an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all".

These two quotes can provide inspiration for those engaging and interested in the exciting frontiers of online academic publishing through blogs and other informal media. The pressures of the symbiotic relationship between blogging and publishing have forced mainstream media to offer olive branches to the online citizenry. Journalism has tipped first, academia will follow.