Fred Stuzman: Blogging: Academia's Digital Divide?:
Considering the value my blog has added to my academic experience, I tend to believe that academic blogs will eventually mainstream. Their acceptance will take some time, but the value provided by blogging - in terms of connecting with others, the public debate, the real dialogue that emerges - will be self-evident. Of course, some things will never change - being a good blogger will always take effort, and not all of us need to blog. However, as we see models develop for academic blogging, it stands that more and more of us will want to take advantage of the benefits.
While science blogging has some specifics that make it different from social science/liberal arts part of the campus, Fred's notes are quite applicable to us as well.
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The "mainstream" has never been very deep, pardon my elitist point of view.
I actually agree that immediacy, interaction and democratically ubiquitous access among other traits, insure the blog a place in the future of science communication and the very record of science the growing tree of human knowledge.
But...
Journals, and symposia made from many submissions and culled and vetted for significance and thematic wholeness will be difficult to approximate in blogs until better tagging and more intelligent [semantic web + context-sensitive by academic specialty] filtering are readily available. The typical researcher and even just polymath lay readers like me are completely overwhelmed by the bandwidth required even to sample whats out there now...and it will grow.