Too much time on my hands today...it's the calm before the grading storm, with final web class projects due at midnight tonight. Outside, it's cold and gray, with rain turning to snow, so there's no temptation to head out. So instead, I'm blogsurfing. Most of my blogly neighborhood has been pretty quiet today, which meant I was tempted to venture further out, using technorati's interesting newcomers list as my starting point.
That led me to sociology professor Kieran Healy's blog, which appears to have made the list in large part because of its wonderful parody of ready.gov. And Kieran, in turn, pointed me to Swarthmore history professor Timothy Burke, whose blog is worth looking at just for its title and tagline (and worth putting on your blogroll for its interesting content). Burke has a link from his blog to a piece he wrote called How to Read in College, which I intend to make required reading the next time I teach a theory-focused grad class. (Very sad that most of our grad students need this as much as--if not more than--our undergrads, but it's true.)
So my "academics" blogroll is expanding, which is a good thing (for the richness of ideas I'm finding), and a not-so-good-thing (for the time it will inevitably take to read and reflect on their writing). But particularly interesting to me right now is where the points of intersection--if any--are in these circles of blogs. While these are people writing and thinking about issues that I'm seeing in the blogs of many of my current "blog circle," they're names that I've not encountered before. And their blogrolls have almost no names in common with mine.
I wonder...do the blogs that tend toward the upper boundary of Shirky's power law distribution serve as the "connectors" that Gladwell describes in The Tipping Point? Or are the connectors found more in the middle of the curve. Those are the kinds of questions I'd really like to find a way to answer.
