Today at First Monday:

I am a blogging researcher: Motivations for blogging in a scholarly context
Sara Kjellberg
The number of scholarly blogs on the Web is increasing. In this article, a group of researchers are asked to describe the functions that their blogs serve for them as researchers. The results show that their blogging is motivated by the possibility to share knowledge, that the blog aids creativity, and that it provides a feeling of being connected in their work as researchers. (Show me more…)

A recent opinion article in Nature may serve as my diving board here. Althoug texts are much better edited by professional journalists, the content isn’t better (driven mainly by press release). And of course, journalists must write about topics outside of their knowledge zone. Funny, they resemble

more that of a priest, taking information from a source of authority and communicating it to the congregation.

Journalists don’t have enough time for the details while bloggers can restrict themselves to their main expertise ;-) raising also a large amount of public awareness.

Just recently I came across a site (but can’t rememeber the URL) – basically saying that this is not a blog but just a few notes, how and why I did something to convince me at a later time of its justification. Yea, yea.

The WordPress editor window is somewhat odd if you are writing in text mode but need to scroll down to preview your post. From several blog editors that I have tested now – there is now one that made it onto my desktop. Scribe Fire is an advanced Firefox plugin that can be nicely configured as you can see on this screenshot.
The “powered by” can be switched off (Show me more…)