I’ve decided I really like blogging — it oddly makes me more productive because it gets me in the mood for writing and it’s a nice way to process the first-year on the tenure track without burdening your colleagues, friends, and family with your worries. The main problem has been WordPress’ blog stats. You can use it to check to see how many people have visited your blog and where they came from… I check this entirely too often.
I was disturbed today when I checked it and saw that the number of hits in the last 5 hours was about 4 times the usual. It turns out, insidehighered.com has a little “Around the Web” section and they had linked to my post on the job market rumor mill with the following:
Getting gossip and real information about job searches, in New Soc Prof….
On the one hand, this is sort of cool. I feel like I’ve made the big-time or something (I’m no 100,000 hits scatterplot or anything but hey, this is cool). On the other hand, I’m feeling that my odds of being outed just went up exponentially. I also feel sorry for all the poor job candidates who saw that description and linked to my blog thinking they would get actual concrete information on the job market. I wonder how inside higher ed decides who to link to? Is it random?
SIDEPOINT: I was showing Mr. Me the link on insidehighered.com and he was much more interested in the title line to this article, noting “Gee, that’s an interesting turn of phrase…”
Wow, congratulations to making it to IHE! That should kick up your Technorati ranking! You DO check your Technorati raking, right??
Now, get to work on that gossip part of things! God knows academia is fertile ground!
SocProf, I have long thought a gossip site about sociology would be the most clicked-on soc blog ever, but (of course) I will not be starting it.
Imagine the blind items… .
“What C-list associate professor in a prestigious Northeastern SLAC is giving her students grades for more than scholarly aptitude?”
“What A-list sociologist with crazy hair and suspect hygiene gives ‘accept’ or ‘revise-and-resubmit’ decisions for any and all papers that favorably assess his theory?”
“What B-list R1 department is so hard up for cash that they’ve placed a coffee can in the student lab to collect excess change from their (soon to be unfunded) grad students?”
(NOTE: NOT REAL BLIND ITEMS, fer Pete’s sake.)
Congrats on the shout-out, newsocprof!
I have absolutely no idea what a Technorati ranking is… I suspect I will by the end of the day but this may also be the thing that tips the blog from helping me to be productive to getting in the way of productivity.
And, yes, I do yearn to be the Ted Casablancas of the academy. I was thinking if I was outed and people had a problem with the blog in my department, I could frame it as a sort of professional service (de-mystifying the first year for advanced grads or whatever) — adding Blind Vice items would seriously undermine this.
Forget Ted Casablanca! Imagine yourself as Melissa Rivers, “Live from the Red Carpet” as the keynote address at the ASA annual meeting!:-P