Colleen, I share the attitude, but still have to deal with the environment :)

If you look at the fast changing media and at new emerging technologies you may be endlessly enchanted by the new ideas, capabilities and traits that each one integrates. At the same time, the more you closely follow such change……

In scholarly work, this compounds when you’re ‘encouraged’ NOT to use blogs in your citations. I just finished my dissertation, and …I did it anyway, as are many currently rejecting ’scholarly’ standards. But I’m not sure how we can have it both ways, multiple ways, all ways. Share what you can, cite where you can, attribute freely. The whole is greater than the sum and ideas will always be ours regardless of how often they’re repeated, improved, distorted.

however, I think the issues you’re describing here go beyond just blogging. for example, Einstein develops the idea of special relativity while Poincare and a slew of other folks come up with something similar. Einstein goes farther to develop general relativity. whose idea is that? is it Einstein’s, because only he came up with the general form of relativity? or does it partially belong to all the other mathematicians and physicists by whom Einstein was influenced? what about Leibniz and Newton with calculus? or people like C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien who directly collaborated and developed ideas together? questions about attribution of ideas when an individual has ideas because of being part of a collective exchange amongst a group of people definitely span beyond blogging. they’re certainly interesting questions, mind you, and it may be that blogging (and blog reading) bring them to the fore, but I don’t think they’re confined to blogs.

Lilia Effimova appears to have completed her PhD research and is actively blogging. She provides a thoughtful and critical voice to online communication. In a recent post she tackles the key challenge of attribution and idea ownership in blogs. The……