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July 17, 2008.

Blogmersion, Part 2: McProfessor.com

Now that I got on the psychiatry roll it's hard to stop. After all I went into psychiatry because I was really interested in philosophy and writing but they told me I couldn't make a living that way. But what about Socrates? Didn't he live off of donations?

Anyway, blogmersion the second part. I define blogmersion (a term I just made up) as the use of weblogs (shortened to the term "blog") to connect with other people and even past times and places through the internet. Also facilitated by email, YouTube, file sharing sites, myspace, yourspace, etc. etc.

As I said in my last post, blogmersion can have a liberating effect. Let's look at it's effect on academia (my own particular corner of the universe). Once academics sat in their offices with large bookcases and wrote papers that went into journals that were read by maybe a handful of people, and that only because they had to read them and understand their contents so that they can meaningfully discuss them in their own papers and list them in their list of references, otherwise they wouldn't get their own papers published because Professor #1 was likely a "peer reviewer" of their paper and might get pissed off if his "highly relevant" paper was ignored.

Kind of a racket.

And not very satisfying.

Enter blogmersion. Now McProfessor can make his (very important) views known to the world, and without the filter of "peer review" or politics. And he can dump that stodgy and boring writing style used for journals and just say what he (notice I am not saying "she" (Ha!)) wants to use.

And there are a lot of them out there. Dr. David Colquhoun has noticed that there are a lot more people interested in his caustic remarks about pseudoscience on his dcscience.net website than his latest biochemistry results. He recently proudly announced that he had passed half a million viewers. Go professor!

The Last Psychiatrist engages in navel gazing and pondering various abstruse topics such as the meaning of YouTube and porn. He announces that he is an academic psychiatrist who was rated by his peers as being amongst the top 5% of psychiatrists in America. Is he seeking recognition for himself? Apparently not, since he writes anonymously. So what does he want? Why, for you to read his web site of course.

The good doctors at sciencebasedmedicine.org have realized that by banding together in a group of five that one of them can write a blog essay every day which keeps their content fresh and drives them up in those highly sought after google search ratings. They let their inner Mr. Hydes run loose against a range of peeves including woo and failures of logic. If someone says in the comment section "I can tell you from experience..." they snap back "No you can't."

I can go on. Not to mention how they cite and link to each other and put each other on their blog rolls. I comment on their sites with links to their sites hoping I'll get noticed. I haven't felt this way since I was the last pick for pickup baseball and noone wanted me on their team.

Dr. DCScience.net, could you put me on your blogroll? Pretty please?