In my daily online reading, I encounter weblogs from a variety of disciplines, and I see weblogs used in all kinds of ways. It's not that I think any one discipline exemplifies "best practices" of using weblogs, but sometimes I look at what others do with weblogs and then look at what we as rhetoricians do, and I think, could we do better? Could we be more seriously and intellectually engaged with each other, at least some of the time? (Not all the time. I love fun posts and would never want to see those go away!)

See, for example, Crooked Timber's China Miéville Seminar. Several Crooked Timber posters read Miéville's novel Iron Council and wrote thoughtful essays on it. Links to the essays were all brought together in one post, and readers can read and leave comments under the essays, to which the authors of the essays respond. They even got Miéville himself to contribute an essay in response to the others. Just look at it; there's a lot of rich intellectual exchange going on. It's a beautiful thing.

See also the History Carnival, a cooperative effort to round up historical scholarship on weblogs. First there was a call for posts (also on the History Carnival site), then a blogger volunteers to collect that issue's submissions and post them to her weblog; the first issue is at Early Modern Notes. Again, wow. I'm impressed as all getout that people are networking scholarly writing like this.

I think we should do something like this. People who study communication and, in particular, communication online, are not yet making the most of the affordances provided by weblogs. So let's do this thing! Would you rather do a seminar or a carnival, or do you have other ideas?

Cross-posted at CultureCat.