I keep getting asked this question by colleagues here at RIT and elsewhere, and I find myself sending them the same links over and over again. So here's what I give people who ask me this, in an attempt to clarify the value of blogging to those of us in academia. It's not all about personal confessionals. Really.
My Posts
you may ask yourself "how did i get here?"
blogging risks and benefits
Anders Jacobsen
Why I blog
Crooked Timber
The Academic Contributions of Blogging?
Academics and Blogging (see the comments)
Academic Blogging and Literary Studies
Lit Studies Blogging, Part II: Better breathing through blogging
Seb Paquet
Personal Knowledge Publishing and Its Uses in Research
Jill Walker and Torill Mortensen
Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool (PDF)
Collin Brooke
Blogging @ MEA (Collin's notes from the panel that I did with Seb Paquet, Alex Halavais, Clay Shirky and Jill Walker)
Also...
University of Minnesota's edited collection of essays, "Into the Blogosphere"
Feel free to add other favorite links to the wiki page I've set up.
Hot off the presses from Amardeep Singh.
G got here first. I was going to mention Amardeep's post, too.
A brief typology with examples (in Spanish) at:
Tipología y ejemplos de uso de weblogs en universidades.
Caleb McDaniel on The Blogging Graduate Student at Cliopatria.
It's not exactly a 'why blog?' posting, but I've posted recently on the still-persistent snobbism that refuses to see blogs as a proper venue for serious academic discussion. I think I get at the value of academic blogging in that, in only obliquely.
In that post, I also reference Mark Dery's inaugural blog post at his Shovelware site. Again, maybe not quite what you're looking for, but I liked this mini-manifesto anyhow.
Blogging is a venerable scholarly tradition that goes back to the 1550's!!!! This is worth a scholarly article.
A corollary to this question might be: "Why do academics get their students to blog?" Or, do you really want bottom-up participation? To me, currently still an academic at the University of Michigan, one of the key advantages of blogging is that it allows bottom-up expression with fewer (I wanted to say no, but you're pretty sharp) filters. That makes more information available but does shift the editorial function.
One thing that may interest you is an experiment we have undertaken at the University of Michigan in creating a "Learning Blogosphere" where I tried to encourage bottom-up participation from students and feel I may have actually succeeded. I have begun to write about it here and plan on following up with various analyses over the next few weeks:
http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/03/a_learning_blog.html
Beautiful selection of this blog topic. This topic provides relevant information.