For the day this was: True Economics blog marked its 5th anniversary today, so many thanks to all of the readers and all who contributed their comments to this blog. Thanks to hundreds of journalists who quoted from the blog and cited it, and even to some academic and policy researchers who did the same. Thanks to all students who found some of the ideas discussed here worthy of learning about. Thanks to a small number of contributors and friends who on some occasions posted on the blog.
And special thanks to the person who talked me into starting this blog.
Here's to many more years and many more readers!
The true economics blog has one crucial ingredient that any decent blog should have, a consistency. It's easy I have discovered to begin a blog, and begin on one theme, then allow another to creep in, and then another. Finally, one can get to a stage where a whole lot of different strands are mingled up together, effort going in a hundred different directions, but not enough in any one.
ReplyDeleteThis is what the better blog should always be about, consistency of effort in one direction. Strangely enough, while at first glance, there may seem to be parts of everything thrown in to True Economics, statistics on Mondays and Art on Saturdays or Sundays, I can see how one is reflective of another. Both art and statistics are intended to be diagrammatic - offering us a picture, a trend or a pattern - in short, a concept of some kind.
While those in economics or business (especially in Ireland), may have 'discovered' the blog in the later 2000s, it is something that first grew up and seemed very radical around the mid 2000s. I remember at that time, Nick Carr, a former editor of the Harvard Business Review published an article in early 2000s, shortly after the dot com stock market bust, called 'IT doesn't matter'.
It challenged a lot of prevailing wisdom about the strategic value of information technology in the early part of the 2000s decade. He even enraged some fortune 500 CEO's with his writing at that time, and it resulted in his publishing of his first book, IT Doesn't Matter. Which was followed by several other books since then. However, what I discovered having read his early articles (one of Carr's articles from 1999, talked a lot about working environments and I think referenced the sociologist and author Richard Sennett), and read his blog in the mid 2000s, that one supported the other.
Again, as I say, consistency of effort.
More recently, I was amused by Carr's take on his own blog and the format. He compared it to another piece of technology, a phone from the 1980s without a handset used by author Kevin Kelly. Enjoy.
http://www.roughtype.com/?p=3360
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