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Blogging as a model for invention?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

The blog overcomingbias has an entry of relevance to inventors, as well as to bloggers:

So where will blog posts fit in? While most academic papers and books are long, many ideas worthy of academic attention can be clearly explained in a short blog post. In fact, many academic papers and even books consist of a short good idea and then a lot of other not especially useful material that shows the author can do impressive hard work. So in principle, blog posts could fit into the world of academic work.

But, if social norms allow academics to ignore blog posts, by not citing clearly relevant and influential blog posts just because they are blog posts, then blog writers will have little incentive to offer insightful comments that can be fit easily into an academic network of cited insights. Blog writers will instead have the incentives of newspaper columnists, to provide an engaging style with little expectation of originality or cumulative expert influence. Such blog writers might well cite each other, but more as a way to create an engaging multi-character show for their readers.

And if inventors received no protection against copyists, they would have no incentive to offer inventions. The Venetians figured this out in 1474. Mike at Techdirt has not figured this out in 2008.

Full post as published by IPBiz on May 01, 2008 (boomark / email).