Brian Leiter has two interesting posts up (one two) on the question of whether academics should be able to claim scholarly credit for blogging. It is fairly clear that good blogging should count as service. Indeed in all my recent self-promoting activities I’ve been plugging my work on various blogs as a service both to the public and the profession. But whether this counts as scholarly work is a tougher question.

I’m mostly in agreement with Brian’s position that the standards in the blogosphere are too loose to justify calling our posts scholarship. One reason this is not likely to change anytime soon is that the posts reflect the lack of standards. Most of what I write for blogs barely deserves to be called a first draft. Others I know are more careful, but I suspect there are very few bloggers who take as much care over their blog posts as they would over passages in a journal article.

On the other hand, it’s certainly possible that scholarship is advanced by our efforts on blogs, especially when blogs are used to trial genuinely new ideas. And if anyone wants to give me a pay raise on the basis of blog work, I won’t let my principles get in the way! But it will be a long time before I start listing any especially good blogposts on my CV.