Why Blog?

I'm preparing for a ten minute presentation on using blogs for resource sharing for our faculty and just came across this quotation from
an article about history blogs. Tim Burke (of Cliopatria) answers why he blogs:

"# Because I want to introduce some unexpected influences and ideas into my intellectual and academic work. I want to unsettle the overly domesticated, often hermetic thinking that comes with academic specialization. I want to introduce a 'mutational vector' into my scholarly and intellectual work.

# Because I want a place to publish small writings, odd writings, leftover writings, lazy speculations, half-formed hypotheses. I want a place to publish all the things that I think have some value but not enough to constitute legitimate scholarship. I want a chance to branch into new areas of specialization at a reduced level of intensity and seriousness.

# Because I want to find out how much of my scholarly work is usefully translatable into a wider public conversation. A lot of my writings on Iraq, for example, are really a public working-out of more scholarly writing I'm doing in my current monograph, a translation of my academic engagement with the historiography of imperialism.

# Because I want to model for myself and others how we should all behave within an idealized democratic public sphere. I want to figure out how to behave responsibly but also generatively, how to rise to the better angels of my communicative nature.

# Because I'm a compulsive loudmouth."