Becker and Posner

Ideoblog reported that Gary Becker and Richard Posner wrote a very interesting article in the Chicago Tribune about their blog. He said

I was most interested in Posner's comments on why he blogs. In general, I think the quotes in the article line up with observations in my Law and Economics of Blogging: The informality and open access of the blogosphere should be viewed as an important contribution to discourse, not as an invasion of pajama-clad amateurs. Certainly the Becker-Posner example does a lot to improve bloggers' image.Recently Becker and Posner have debated Will China Overtake the U.S., The Bankruptcy Reform Act, The War on Drugs, Judicial Term Limits, Immigration Reform, Medicare Reform, and Tort Reform. The site's a little different in that it doesn't have the daily posting frequently seen in the blogosphere. Posner and Becker decide on a topic, then each writes an entry on it. Both entries are posted about once a week, along with their reactions to comments by readers.

The article, titled SMART BOMBS, with a subtitle: "2 high-powered Chicago thinkers (a Nobel Prize winner and a rabble-rousing federal judge) rattle the blogosphere -- one intellectual grenade at a time" is a very interesting read. For example they said:

• with Business Week or any other magazine, of course, you get letters to the editor. But with the blog, what would be a letter to the editor is a comment that a reader of the blog can just post. It's much easier than writing a letter, it doesn't have to be formal, you don't need a stamp or anything. It's really simple.
  
  Then it's very easy for us to read the comments. And we can respond to them. Again, we don't have space or time limitations, we can respond whenever we have a set of interesting comments, then the commenters, they can go back and forth with each other, so the blog stimulates a kind of interchange that isn't really feasible in the print medium.
  
  And, of course, it's free; we don't get anything and it doesn't cost anything to create the blog; it doesn't cost anything to read it. Once you have [Web access] it's free. You don't have to subscribe, there's no paperwork, no billing. So it has extraordinary flexibility. And autonomy -- you don't negotiate with an editor what you can write about -- you write whatever you want to.
• What's good about it is that through the comments and through other blogs, as we know from the CBS fiasco, there's extremely rapid communication and correction. So the blogger doesn't have his fact-checking staff, but if you make a mistake, within minutes a bunch of people have descended on you.
• People can respond immediately. We usually post Sunday night or Monday morning, and the vast majority of comments that we see are in within a couple of days or so. So this instantaneous ability to be in contact with your readership and get responses from your readership I think is unique to the Internet.

The article ends with a list of other popular and influential academic and/or legal blogs:

• Lessig: A site from technology-law guru Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law.
• Instapundit: Current-affairs site from University of Tennessee law professor Glenn Reynolds.
• Volokh: A group blog addressing legal issues; named for contributor Eugene Volokh, a professor at UCLA's law school.
• Sentencing: Ohio State law prof Douglas Berman's site is one-stop shopping for latest changes to federal sentencing guidelines.
• j-bradford-delong: U of C-Berkeley econ prof J. Bradford DeLong tackles economics, politics and current events.