Think back to when people were saying, "I do NOT have time to deal with email. There is nothing I need to know so quickly that a letter isn’t fast enough – and if there is, use the phone."

It took several decades for email to become an overnight sensation. Many changes had to happen before it reached a tipping point. Can you remember the horrible command line prompts for entering email addresses? Back before there were address books and one click could add a person to your contact list, email was very user-unfriendly. The learning curve just to get to the basics was very steep. It was only after email became much easier to use that it exploded into relative ubiquity. News aggregators (even the term sounds unfriendly) and blogs are still not as easy to use as they should be. Not that one or the other by itself is complex but, the combination is still somewhat confusing (I do what with that orange chicklet on the side of the page? Why does one chicklet say XML, another RDF, and another RSS?). For those of us who have multiple RSS feeds on our blogs and use Flickr, Feedburner, and a myriad of other gadgets, a simple blog and aggregator seems like an easy combination. But, I think we have become experts without realizing it (not that I would even begin to compare myself with the true "cutting edge" folks who are coding and creating apps faster than I can type). So, one issue is the relative immaturity of the technology.

I’m trying to convince them that the process of doing research involves more than reading what somebody wrote about the subject 3 years ago...the old-school notion that you don’t talk about your research until it’s done because somebody might steal it used to be valid. But that was in the old days when the conversations were private. We’re suggesting that the new modes of conversation are public, and as such, constitute a form of protection.

My second point (and one perhaps a little more germane to the pragmatism of the conversation) is that this is also cost-benefit issue. While it is increasingly important to look at rapidly emerging conversations for research (in all their forms), people do not get tenure, promotions, or raises for blogging (in fact, blogging in the corporate world can get you fired).

All this is to say that this is larger than the adoption of a particular technology. It is one of systemic change that requires deeper exploration beyond learning how to blog or use an aggregator. It is about the acceleration of knowledge-sharing and the resulting breakdown of the current peer-review/journal system for research dissemination. Of course, people are working on these problems. David Wiley has been pushing the envelope on all of these issues for sometime (e.g. Pitch - server problems at the time of this writing). But we are not there yet.

Change is happening, albeit slower than some would like and much faster than others care to admit. We are caught in the middle with some immature tools and a vision of what is possible. I love people (because I am one) who used to say (circa Windows 3.0), "Remember DOS? Now everyone thinks computers are easy with Windows but they don't know how the computer really works."

We'll be the ones who say, "I remember when our PIAs (personal information assistants) were called aggregators and you actually had to copy and paste those long URIs in by hand. And the chicklets, do you remember those?? These folks today don't know how good they have it now that they can publish their thoughts and instantly have people with related thoughts automatically added to their PIAs. It's almost like they really don't understand how any of this stuff works on the back end." And, more importantly, "If I don't get more published on my blog this year and more peer comments, I'll never make tenure or get promoted!"

That's when we'll know the technology has arrived. Of course, if everyone sits around waiting for that moment to occur, it never gets here and that's why I applaud Nate for pushing change by starting the conversation.