Yesterday's blog post

You are only as good as your last game - so goes the sporting maxim. And it's true - in sport you can't rest on your laurels, or live on past glories, because before you know it, some young pretender is ready to bury you, and you are suddenly second best. Fortunately, for most of us at least, the academic world usually isn't as cut-throat as that. But it is probably still true that you are only as good as your last journal article, book, or conference presentation. It's important to keep moving forward, because if you stand still, you stagnate and quickly lose touch with the leading edge of your profession. But are you as good as your last blog? Does yesterday's blog post still hold currency or must you continually press forward to write better, to expand on your ideas and elaborate your understanding of your subject?

Well, it's yes to both. Old ideas go out of date. But some old ideas are fine, and the great thing about academic blogging is that the more you write, the greater will be the repository of content you have written. As you post your ideas up on your blog, your archive of posts grows, and people still come to read them, weeks, months, sometimes even years after they have been published. My Teaching with Twitter post from January 2009 is still going strong with 12,000 views. It has been updated several times with new links to relevant related content. This is a little different to publishing a paper based journal article or book. Sure, people still read your article years down the road, but you are a hostage to your own fortune with published printed material. What you have written is there, preserved forever, including old ideas that are later outdated. Perhaps you subsequently rethink, revise or otherwise change your ideas as you learn more. Yet you can't change the printed word. Several times, I have revisited articles I published 5, 10 or even 15 years ago, and I think - ouch - I wish I could change that now.

Blogging is different. I can go back and change something I have written if I subsequently discover that I made a mistake (maybe just a typo, but perhaps even a fundamental error of theory, or a miscalculation) and change it. The new version is still time and date stamped for when I published it. But the content is now more accurate, relevant or appropriate to the message I originally intended. I can also delete something completely if I need to (I have never done this). You can't delete a journal article, and you can't change it once it's in print. All you can do is publish a retraction, but it's like hammering a nail into wood. You can remove the nail, but the hole remains (sometimes in your reputation).

We can debate the ethics of changing a blog post once it has been posted, and yes, there are those who take content under Creative Commons licensing and repurpose it, translate it, embed it. There's little that can be done about that. But with your own blog, you can be master of your own destiny. Should blog posts be changed once they have been published? I think it is up to each individual blogger to decide. What do you think?

Image source by Kristina Barnett

Yesterday's blog post by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.