Upvote main item, I for one welcome our interactive ranking system peer reviewing overlords.

… Do we really want yet another portal as you observe? Do we really want a slashdot.org of the humanities? Even if we did, how are we going to gain the attention of the militaria, geneology and crank-riding autodidacts who comprise a significant proportion of the committed readership for production in my discipline? And do they have twitter accounts?

That’s trivial, I think, for my imagined reader is a scholarly peer who has a marginal interest in my research output as content for a further paper of theirs. I want an upranked google scholar hit on key search terms, not 4chan trying to rig my voting scheme so that Justin Bieber goes to North Korea, or so that the most esteem-factored journal publication on [future publishing mode] is a Sokal Hoax.

Moving beyond the trivial to immediate toolsmithing: do I really need to become a twit to participate in a blog roll such as “Digital Humanities Now”? The core system elements I’m looking for as a writer aren’t there: indication of a review prior to publication thresh-hold, permanency of work, etc.

As a scholarly reader there’s no author information on the articles, other key metadata is missing or unexposed, the commenting system is on the hosted object’s external site, there’s no search system immediately exposed (yeah sure, source is google site:digitalhumanitiesnow.org +labour +contest*).

Developing a reader may involve changing the output of work. A blog post can be a considerable academic investment if the blog post is a stripped down version of an academic statement… kind of the body of the article without the theory/literature review and the discursive exploration. If we post small sections of what would be an article (with process), does that mean I get to count five blog posts each as an article equivalent? I doubt it :).

Returning to this theme, my attention span for blog posts is short. I reply to maybe one in twenty academic blog posts, and read relatively few (though many more than I read journal articles). I don’t commit to reading blog posts because so many are off-field, or meta- in a way I find would just trigger my ideology or methodology in a non-productive way. When I do commit to read I expect short digestible elements. If I wanted a more thorough-going presentation of work, I would seek a journal article with _exact matching_ via scholar.google / etc to my research needs.

I’m certainly not going to commit to a book-length blog argument. The scholarly monographs I read tend to be absolutely vital to developing the theory and methodology of my research. And when I commit to one monograph, more often than not, I commit to the entire academic output of that scholar’s work. (Non scholarly books I read as source material… there’s no commitment issue to them.)

So if there is a “space” in the academic reading public for sub-journal article length works, what do I want as a reader?
* Metadata
* Search hits
* Exposed evidence of peer-reviewing structure (at least an upvote / downvote count, hopefully with an exposure of the broad quality of those up and down vote counts)
* An expectation that the environment is totalising, that it can handle encapsulation of external content in any format, but that it preserves the external content internally as a published record, and that its index is complete. (I’m not going to commit to reading a blog roll)
* Publication modes that allow for a twenty minute read. That’s right, I’m expecting works less than two thousand words, or if exploratory, less than the commitment of reading two thousand scholarly words at article standard. Short ideas, published often.
* Threading, including a differentiation between “off hand” comments and full academic responses with the brain switched on as publications of identical engagement.
* Reader population. Walking into a empty forum is disappointing. If you feel the need, sit in the grave yard of a once successful USENET newsgroup. I can’t get a high feedback high context reader environment from reading a journal article. I don’t want to invest effort in “yet another humanities email list” that dies in three months.

Extracting from the above. My existing social contract with authors is about the volume of commitment to reading and thinking, which is expressed broadly in a set of “lengths” of work. Monograph, journal article, [some sub article length]. The mode and media of publication aren’t important to me. What matters is meta-data, totalising searches, and exposed systems of peer review (Oh that’s OUP / OUP free online, oh that’s the hardcopy of J. Foo Studies, that’s the Journal Equivalent Peer Reviewed article site indexed by scholar.google J. Bar Studies). Also, and obviously, publication permanency, if I want to cite it, I want it to be there when I cite. DOIs please!

Was there really a scarcity of production? The vast output of print publishers–at least until recently–suggests otherwise. There was always more published than the market could bear–many books and journals lost money. We have now enter an era where print publication becomes more difficult, due to the scarcity of attention, the proliferation of forms of publication, and the decline of library and professional budgets.