Matt Yglesias worries that my blog might prevent me from getting tenure by making it look as though I’m not working hard enough. I doubt the blog will make a difference either way, as long as I keep publishing journal articles and the like. One strategy, however, might be to list blog posts on my vita. We are entering a new age of electronic scholarship after all. By this count, I now have just under four hundred publications, which ought to be nearly enough.

Of course, it could also work the other way. For instance, tenure committees could choose to weight a candidate’s publications by, say, the reciprocal of the number of posts in their blog. (Though I suppose this would mean that once you started blogging at all you might as well keep going.) By this measure, at his next post-tenure reivew Brad DeLong would be demoted from being a full Professor at Berkeley to something like assistant hall monitor at the local high school.