"Being well-respected within one’s area of specialist concern is not quite the same as being able to hold one’s own in what the maverick American cultural theorist Kenneth Burke called the parlor.” 

In his Intellectual Affairs column at Inside High Ed, Scott McLernee investigates what it takes to be a succesful academic blogger and argues that getting more than your 15 minutes means you "must bring to the table a particular knack for the kind of discussion fostered by the medium."