Why he blogs

Brad Delong is a Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley, a former Clinton Administration official, and a polymath. He is also a damn fine blogger. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, he explains why he likes blogging, or has he puts it, rather old-fashionally "web logging" (if it's possible to simultaneously be old-fashioned and a blogger, and if 'old-fashionally' is a word, which I'm pretty sure it's not).

Delong likes blogging because it creates an "invisible university," where he can walk down the hall and ask Paul Krugman what he thinks, debate with more right-wingers than can be found on yiour average UC campus, and interact with "aggressive younger people interested in public policy and public finance." His blog gets 20,000 page views a day, far more than would read any academic journals. Plus, it's a good procrastinating tool. It's people like Delong, along with two others he mentions, Daniel Drezner and Juan Cole, that convince me that he's right to conclude that "Web logs may well be becoming an important part of that last university mission": "the turbocharging of the public sphere of information and debate."