Including apparently to generate neologisms, e.g. “co-evoluting” and “acamedic.” Does the latter refer to medical schools?

First of all, thanks for your comment on my site (how did you find it by the way).
Second, I agree with you that blogs should be treated more seriously by the academias. The hyperlinks do make blogs a great tool for academic research.
What I am saying in my post is to abandon the instrumental way of treating blogs. As Whitehead remarks, human beings are co-evoluting with technology. The unique styles and features of blogs to some extent re-configure acamedic writing.

That was what I was working my way towards. You definitely put it more clearly.

Barkley,

You are of course absolutely correct that what gets measured gets managed. If we start counting mentions in acknoledgements then people will troll for those as they now troll for citations. (By the way, when trolling for citations as a referee, I do try to keep it under control, and bury the suggestions in a list of others, if for no other reason than to avoid making it too obvious that I was the referee.

Outcast,

You make a neat point. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we could discount citations by the closeness of the citee to the citer (perhaps measured by cross cites), or at least add double count cites from fields outside the field in which the paper was published.

In the academic world some bias in favor of friends and close colleagues is of necessity since the language talked by subgroups is so alien they are mutually unintelligible for the most part. They thus must either cite things they don’t very well understand or stick to their own little highly biased and highly obscure (to all but themselves) clique. As long as cites by friends count as strongly as cites by strangeers there will remain a very strong incentive to carry on this cite barter among mutually trusting friends, even though such cites indicate social connection rather than anything we should consider to be academic achievement.

I’ll let it go, and will note that I have turned it into mostly teasing, which is largely my attitude towards it. However, it is not just you. All of you have indeed been praising each other to the skies on your respective blogs. The “most brilliant” is you, after all, not so described by yourself (whew).

Certainly you all have a right to do so, and I shall say no more about it, at least not in this venue (I do apologize for having overdone it here). But since you seem to be bothered by my appearance of being bothered by it (which I am not, really, I have been teasing, as I know most of you), you might just ask yourself how it looks to anybody like me who has actually been paying reasonably close attention.

BTW, I think you are the one with the whitest teeth… .

I can’t resist this bit of naught wisecracking. In watching the mutual backscratching and citations of the GMU lunch bloggers crowd, I am beginning to get the impression of a high school about to put out a yearbook. So, any minute I expect one to call another “class clown,” and another will be described as “having the whitest teeth,” and, gosh, we might read that another “was most likely to get his hair cut when his mother told him to in the third grade,” while yet another might be “most likely to save a damsel in distress in a dank dungeon guarded by a demonic dragon.” .