Jason B. Jones at ProfHacker:
The micropayment site Flattr is trying to get November 29 to catch on as “Pay a Blogger Day,” both as a marketing campaign* and an effort to recognize all the free content that people contribute daily to the web. I learned about it from Ernesto Priego’s fine post at HASTAC, “I Smell Smoke”: Blogging as an Endangered Species,” which argues that the ongoing difficulty of finding a place for blogging in the academic rewards system ought to serve as a reality check for more enthusiastic proponents of online scholarship.
Priego’s primary concern is that academics will, necessarily, do what’s best for their chances of being hired, renewed, promoted, and tenured, and so may very well see their online projects as easily abandoned ...
* Instead, I want to propose today as “Buy a single from Craig Finn’s solo project day.” Or, if you like, “buy an academic blogger’s book day.” (I even have a suggestion . . . .)
The real point of the post is not to pay academic bloggers (I hope you don't mind our ads) but that blogging should be recognized as some sort of academic output (in economics, I don't think so) and blog deaths are OK (many academic projects fail [i.e., end without formal output]).
