The Digital Scholar

If you want to become a Digital Scholar, where should you start?

There are many easy ways to get the ball rolling in becoming a Digital Scholar, and you may already be doing some of them. Setting up an account with LinkedIn or Facebook to network more easily with friends and colleagues–especially those with whom you have lost touch–is one way. Setting up a Twitter account for similar reasons is another. You can go to Amazon.com and create recommendation lists to help other readers identify the seminal books in your field of expertise, or you can even start contributing articles to Wikipedia.

All of the above activities can help spread your reputation as a scholar. But if you are serious about preparing yourself for the new world of publishing, starting a blog is the best way to go.

One of the reasons why writing a blog is such a powerful tool for participating in the new world of publishing is that once it is up and running, you are perfectly positioned to utilize to the fullest the new publishing technologies for producing, distributing, and drawing attention to your scholarship.

Here are some other reasons why blogs are one of the best publishing tools for the Digital Scholar:

• Blogs are relatively easy to set up and maintain. Even though setting up a blog can be time consuming and a bit tricky at first, it is still much easier and faster to put together than designing your own website. Once you get your blog up and running, adding content to it is a breeze, so you can focus on your writing and scholarship, not website design. (See Blogging for some links and tips to help you get started building your blog.)
• People can easily discover you and your scholarship through your blog. People turn to the web to answer questions and find information about topics that interest them all the time. Your blog can become an authoritative source on the web for providing information about your area of expertise.
• Blogs are a great showcase for you and your work. You can easily direct people to your blog, where they can gain a deeper understanding of what you and your scholarship are all about. You can include the URL for your blog in e-mail signatures, on business cards, and on your Facebook profile. If your URL is catchy enough, you can even verbally encourage friends and colleagues to check out your blog.
• You can build a regular readership with a blog. The regular-article format of a blog gives people who are interested in your area of expertise a reason to return to your site to read your next article.
• You become an instant author/publisher of your own work with a blog. As soon as you hit the “Publish” button, people from around the world can read and comment on your work. A blog is a great place to try out new ideas and see what people think about them before taking those ideas to a traditional publisher. It also lets you build or enhance your reputation in that subject area while you are still testing out those ideas.
• A blog can help you create content for other publishing formats. If you find the task of sitting down to write a book or journal article daunting, the short-article format usually associated with a blog can help you break your subject down into smaller chunks. Keep writing these small articles, and before you know it, you will have plenty of material for that article or book.
• You can use your blog to get a traditional publishing contract. If you write an active blog, you become more attractive to traditional publishers because of the attention you can generate through it.
• You can use your blog to advertise your book or other writing. Whether you publish a book independently, go through a traditional book publisher, or write an article for another venue, you can use your blog to market it. In turn, you can use these other writing opportunities to drive more traffic to your blog.

Blogs can produce big dividends for the Digital Scholar, because they are an idea and content generator, publishing mechanism, and marketing venue all rolled up into one. Blogs require some effort to get started, but once they are up and running, they can pack a powerful punch in the publishing world.