Long Tail Epistemology

More and more organisations are thinking about web 2.0. Blogging has been viewed both as a way of promoting an organization as well as unnecessary and time consuming. I guess that depends on the organisation and the blogger - and the situation as a whole. For some organisations promotion is one of the core areas. A University, for example, is driven by promotion. Promotion leads to new students, new researchers, new possibilities.

One of the problems is that universities and similar organisations have a graphic profile and do not want to be connected to blogging services as Wordpress.com or Blogger. On the other hand, they do not want common things like blogs in their fine publishing systems. Of course, this is a case of ignorance.

I know for a fact that some research bloggers would not like to be internalised in the universities publishing profile. My own blogging has to this day been done outside normal working ours, so I haven’t reflected on it.

But lately my thoughts have wandered in the direction of viewing blogging as a normal research activity. Blogging is a way of reaching outside your normal context. And for universities it would be a chance of promoting the research and experience of their researchers - and other staff too.

It could be done like this: Do you see the graphic in this post? View it as a stamp. It should be an official graphic following the organisation’s graphic profile - this was done quickly by myself in Photoshop as an example of how it could look like. The graphic could be placed in the sidebar and linked to a page at the university web site, where all their bloggers are listed and presented.