Comments on: too sick to be anything but meta

By: Danny O'Brien

Danny O'Brien — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 23:56:13 +0000

One MILLION dollars

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 19:26:37 +0000

Hi,

I am interested in purchasing one to two simple text links on your website’s homepage. How much would you charge for that?

Thanks.

Bryan
–
Bryan Wisotsky
Internet Marketing Associate
SportsMemorabilia.com
http://www.SportsMemorabilia.com

By: Rose White

Rose White — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 16:05:55 +0000

I’ve been saying for a year now that I’m going to put up a website that lists all the thesis topics I’m NOT pursuing, with a note at the end saying, “No, really, I promise, please go write about one of these, that would be lovely of you, have fun now, byeee!”

I really really ought to do this. Hmm.

By: nick s

nick s — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 07:58:17 +0000

The obvious problem: many places that reward good ideas in an institutional way — oh hello, academia! — want the books and the articles, and not a ‘web’ [sniff] ‘log’. Efficient? Of course not. Academic publishing is a vanity press sustained by its role in institutional advancement, turning one set of drudges into another.

That’s changing: the academic listservs were handling notes-and-queries work before blogs, and there’s an obvious niche for those who make hard-to-find old texts available in scholarly forms, even though that challenges another niche — the comparatively easy work of editing those texts for compilations or anthologies that’s a nice little earner for the tenured.

It’s not changing as fast as the technology would allow, for obvious reasons: just as Labour MPs won’t make guinea pigs of their kids by sending them to Bogstandard Comp, the kind of academics who are most likely to have the combination of tech skills and research obligations to do Really Good Stuff are also least likely to do the career equivalent of hacking off their legs with a rusty scythe.

In short: well, she can talk. She’s getting paid.