Sunday, April 04, 2004
(7:45 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Optimal Blog Sizes
Kieran Healy notes that the Crooked Timber team has increased to fifteen and includes some helpful diagrams speculating about rugby strategies. She also has links to other group blogs of similar size, and I realized how far The Weblog must go before it becomes a world-class group blog. Part of the problem may be the fact that our domain name is the same as my name -- but that's not holding The Volokh Conspiracy back.
As of right now, this is effectively a two-man blog, since Anthony's in France, Michael Schaefer retired almost as soon as he started, and Michael Hancock is apparently dead. Robb is posting once or twice a week, which is really all I ask, but my prolific posting usually means he is scrolled down rather quickly, perhaps discouraging further posting.
All this to say: I have some work ahead of me if I want to get up to a rugby team-sized group blog. My first move would obviously be to convince the authors of my sister sites to write for The Weblog, perhaps even poaching a couple contributors from The H is O. Although à Gauche has previously said that combining both of us into one blog would create too much material for most readers to handle, he seems to have slowed down considerably. (In addition, I just ran a Google search for his real name, and the à Gauche site is the top result, despite his attempt at pseudonymity. Perhaps his Google profile would be cleaner if he contributed to a blog not solely tied to his name....)
The next step would be to create several pseudonyms for myself in order to pad the list of contributors, then get a couple of the academic celebrities with whom I am personally acquainted -- such as Jurgen Habermas, Gayatri Spivak, or Fred Jameson, for example -- on board. (Last time I hung out with Stanley Fish at Starbucks, I jokingly asked him if he would write for us, and he seemed genuinely disappointed when I said I was just kidding.)
Okay, problem solved: within a couple weeks, we'll be able to challenge the Crooked Timberites in rugby. I don't know how to play any sport but ping-pong, but we do have youth on our side, and none of our contributors or potential contributors are pregnant (nor, indeed, female -- Kandice, accept my invitation, damn it!).
On a related note: should I change the title of this blog to "The University Without Condition"?
UPDATE:
Noam Chomsky has agreed to come on board! He's asked me to post an initial statement on his behalf:
Noam Chomsky's posts will include brief comments on diverse topics of concern in our time. They will sometimes come from the ZNet Sustainer Forum System where Noam interacts through a forum of his own, sometimes from direct submissions, sometimes culled from mail and other outlets -- always from Noam Chomsky.
FURTHER UPDATE:
Already I'm convinced that I shouldn't change the name of the site, since the university without condition was, from its very inception, an inter-blog event -- beginning with my development of the underlying concept through various whiny posts about grad school and à Gauche's subsequent suggestion that we begin to do it online and his provision of the bulk of the texts we have studied. (My five minutes of blogging fame seem to have momentarily inspired me with delusions of a blogging imperial project.)
