Two blog posts arguing the place of blogging in academic writing–“Blogs as Catalysts” by Daniel Little and “Six Years of Understanding Society” by Jay Ulfelder. Both men make the case that blogging allows them to put ideas in play that they can hone into more polished academic work. In the words Ulfelder: “You might say I’ve become an ‘open-source’ philosopher — as I get new ideas about a topic I develop them through the blog. This means that readers can observe ideas in motion.” Back in the 1970’s Monty Python’s Flying Circus had a skit about Thomas Hardy writing in front of cheering crowd, a comedy peace about writing as essentially solitary, but the dynamic Little and Ulfelder is the rough draft as public document not played for laughs, it’s about a reconceptualizing of private and public writing space. Now, mixing those two things up is not always a good idea, but an “open-source” progression for an idea connect to a voice, an authorial voice, has interesting bibliographic possibilities in how different researchers may cite to different variations on the same idea. That one idea may find itself in different research in different rhetorical lights…akin perhaps to the photographs of a person in the different periods of their life, the same person, but a distinct persona.