Thursday 4 August 2011

Of Doomsday Machines and Blogs

If you have a Doomsday Machine - one that will destroy the whole world if anybody messes with you - it would be insane not to tell anybody about its existence. The whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret!

Same for blogs. Why bother having a blog if you don't tell anybody about it?

And so I was surprised to find, in Seamus's post the other day, that the New Zealand Association of Economists has a blog. It isn't updated very often, but it's still there. And I'd thought that Offsetting, AntiDismal, and TVHE were the only non-defunct NZ econ blogs with an academic focus.

Here's Bill Kaye-Blake from back in March giving reasons why folks might blog. He suggests signalling. As signals need recipients, hit his RSS feed.

5 comments:

  1. No fighting in the war room gentlemen...
    http://www.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf_deadhand

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  2. You might infer that we intend to announce the blog "at the Party congress".

    Or maybe it is a different movie.

    How about Pirates of the Carribean: "the Blog de Meurta that cannot be found except by those who already knows where it is". Or Harry Potter 8: "The Blog of Requirement--If you have to ask, you'll never know; if you know, you need only ask".

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  3. A dumb question: how do you tell people you have a blog? Announce it on your blog?

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  4. @Nick: When I started, I told the other folks in NZ who were blogging and who'd be interested: TVHE on economics, David Farrar at Kiwiblog (the main NZ blog), Paul Walker at AntiDismal. I'd done it by email, but leaving comments on folks' blogs pointing to yours, in a thin market like here, works well too. When John Small started blogging over at Progressive Turmoil, one of the ways he announced a presence was by commenting here with a profile that linked back to his new blog.

    NZ's a pretty thin market. Everybody in econ kinda knows who everybody else is. If another academic or NZAE person starts blogging, it's not hard to throw a note to folks who're already blog...

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  5. EC. Did I not tell you aboot the NZAE blog? I should have. Its been in my sidebar list of blogs for a few weeks now. But as the association can't have an official position on anything its blog really can't say much. All the interesting stuff will have to come from personal blogs, of which there are very few.

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