The Anthroplogical Noosphere Grows Yet Again
by Alex
“John Norvell”:http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~norvell/ has thrown his hat into the ring with “anthroblogs.org”:http://www.anthroblogs.org/, an MT install with a few blogs on them, including “his own”:http://www.anthroblogs.org/norvell/ and a “group blog”:http://www.anthroblogs.org/anthroblogblog of which he seems so far to be the only contributor. There is also a “wiki”:http://www.anthrowiki.org/ on anthropology which at the moment is more or less empty. This last project, like the wiki over at “anthropology.net”:http://anthropology.net/ seems to me like it may end up languishing. His “list of academics who blog”:http://www.anthrowiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Blogging_in_Academia doesn’t seem to include any other anthropologists, which makes me feel like chopped liver or maybe John’s just a little newer to the game than most. It also doesn’t include the two dozen or so academics who I read regularly. I mean — maybe Juan Cole or Crooked Timber should be on that list? But I suppose no one has a right to complain about a wiki when they haven’t taken the time to edit it. I must say, though, that the idea that the best way to locate content on the internet is by composing one super huge static (albeit world-writeable) list of academics who blog is really _very_ 1997, even if you host the list on the Latest Hippest Knoweldge Platform. A list of academics who blog? It would have literally thousands of entries! That’s why god made Web 2.0, dude.
At any rate, the blogs on the site seem to have a fair amount of excitement going forward and I’m looking forward to seeing how they develop. The site has the affiliation with one of anthropology’s hottest brand at the moment, Rob Borofsky’s “Public Anthropology”:http://www.publicanthropology.org/ series (the other, as far as I can tell, being Princeton’s “in-formation”:http://www.pupress.princeton.edu/catalogs/series/if.html series), and his blog looks genuinely good, so I’m hoping he’ll become a member of the (polite cough) already existing anthropology noosphere which has (polite cough) already written a lot about anthropology on that “other, larger wiki”:http://en.wikipedia.org/ (disclosure: Rob is the senior member of my department).
So John — welcome aboard! I look froward to reading more of your blog!
Thanks for kind welcome. I do realize that the wiki list of academic bloggers is a bit primitive, but it evolved from a personal wiki to a public one that has not been really been launched yet. (Tell old Rob it’s time to cough up his email list!) I am also a little leery of linking a wagon to bloglines and del.icio.us and so forth–great ideas but, will they be here next year? When moviecritic.com closed its doors without warning and took about a hundred hours worth of my movie ratings with it, it was a shock I never got over. I am, any hour now, going to install the rssfeed movable type plugin and try to convert the bloggers lists to feeds on that site. Syndication should top out at about a dozen different protocols by the end of the year, and then that’ll be mor or less stable. :-)