One of the other points that struck me about John Quiggin’s response to the Sinnott-Armstrong’s Stanford piece was that it was the first time I could recall someone treating the Stanford Encyclopaedia as a blog. That is, someone (quite properly) treating what it says as contentious rather than authoritative, and responding to it in ‘real-time’. This all seemed perfectly natural, as soon as it was done. The Stanford Encyclopaedia is a kind of carefully written (large) group blog. That got me thinking about other sites which could well be regarded as blogs.

I seem to recall that a while ago I used to read all sorts of blogs that didn’t update regularly, but the updates they had were usually careful and well thought out. Blogs that emphasised quality over quantity. I still read lots of high quality blogs, but mostly they tend to be fairly high quantity as well. (And I read plenty of low quality high quantity blogs. Gotta keep up with the competition.)

Maybe, though, I do read the high quality low quantity blogs, I just don’t think of them as blogs. For instance, one could well regard Geoffrey Nunberg’s home page as a blog, with the entries being the frequent NY Times and Fresh Air pieces he posts. Today’s entry is on whether there is a word for ‘compromise’ in Arabic, and what we might think about those why deny such a word exists. Geoff’s entries are not that infrequent. He posts something every week or two, which is helter-skelterish by academic standards, and given that the entries usually involve actual research, it seems reasonable to count it as an exemplar of the quality over quantity blog I was discussing above.

Another page like this is Shawn Fitzgibbons’s blurbs page. (Shawn is a philosophy grad student at UMass.) I didn’t agree with several of Shawn’s conclusions, but again it’s an example of a site updated reasonably regularly (one entry per week on average this year I guessed) with more careful thought than you’ll see on some blogs.