How blogging is like a cocktail party

Jeff Pomerantz wonders what it means for him (as an academic) to blog, and he has some interesting ideas.

. . . it occurs to me that the fact that my readers know who I am but I don’t know who they are, makes writing this blog pretty much like all of the writing I do professionally. I publish a paper, the reader knows who I am, but I don’t know who they are or even if they’re reading it. And there’s less chance that I’ll get comments, making the reader even more of a stranger to me. Plus I know many of the people personally who may be reading my stuff; LIS just isn’t that large a field. So I have people I know personally sneaking around reading my writing, & not telling me, & I have no way to know they’re doing it. Jeez, when I put it that way… how weird does that sound? (Or at least I don’t know they’re reading my stuff until I read their stuff and I’m cited in it, inshallah.)

So what’s the big deal? I ask myself. Why do I feel differently about this form of writing than I do about any of my other forms of writing? . . .