Tim Burke’s lastest post is a must read. He discusses the benefits of academic blogging and explains why he is often the intellectual referee of the academic blogosphere. (Long time readers of blogs like Crooked Timber know of Tim’s gravitas.)

His comments about the strangeness of the bonds that we form through blogging I think will appeal to everyone.

…my blog writing does feel surreal to me sometimes. It involves me in a discursive world that sometimes feels like a small town where everyone knows one another. Kieran knows Harry who knows Russell who knows Laura who knows Rana who knows Elizabeth who knows John. They all know me, or at least the highly public, constrained, particular reduction of me who manifests in my online voice.

There’s a circle of people reading and writing about each others blogs and so much of what they have to say influences my waking thoughts. I crave their approval and respect. But at the same time, so little of that conversation comes into explicit ways into my day-to-day professional life or my personal life. I can come home and say, “You’ll never believe what that Belle Waring had to say today!”, but it takes so much set-up to stop the flow of an always-moving discussion and explain it to my wife that it’s not really worth the effort. I can say to a colleague, “I think you’ll really like what Russell Arben Fox had to say recently”, but I always feel vaguely embarrassed when I do, because I don’t know what they’ll think if they do go and look—will it take too much prior experience of ongoing discussions to appreciate it? will they wish I hadn’t wasted their time on something that they couldn’t immediately cite and make ‘normal’ scholarly use out of?—and because I feel a little like the guy who goes to lectures by engineers and tries to tell them about his perpetual motion machine. Sometimes it’s like being under the spell of some alien intelligence, on the other side of an ethnographic divide, a native mumbling to the patient, civilized researcher about the inexpressible interior feeling of his own culture.

Burke adds, “… I am constantly transformed and affected by relationships with are entirely in my own head as far as everyone around me is concerned.”

The world of blogging is a small town, an inside joke, a blunder, a chimera, yet very real. Read it.