5.4 The Subject Matter Expert

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If you spent much time on the previous page browsing through the sites collected at PhD Weblogs then you likely stumbled into more than one blog that began as a research diary before evolving into a more general clearinghouse of information pertaining to the writer's particular research interests. Rather than focusing on a specific project with its associated dates, deadlines, findings, and progress reports, such blogs instead take on a broader scope.

During the early days of the Internet boom, many of the web's most innovative and frequently-visited pages were "fan sites" that simply collected news, images, and sounds associated with, say, a movie star or musical act. In a sense, academics are highly-credentialed fans. We discover our particular enthusiasms—whether they be supply side economics, constitutional law, or Jane Austen—and build a professional career around them.

Blogging enables even the least web-savvy to establish a "fan site" in a matter of minutes. By doing so, you also establish your online presence as a "subject matter expert," which often comes with the added benefit of free self-promotion. As an aside: I frequently receive from readers of my site unsolicited offers to publish articles and to present at conferences.

A helpful hint: Blogging tools are very good at automatically generating top-level navigation like monthly archives. But they are not designed to build logical, sub-levels of navigation, which means that readers often find it difficult to pinpoint a particular piece of content within a large blog.

I've solved this problem on my own site by creating blog posts that act as sub-menus. For example, I am, for lack of a better word, a "subject matter expert" on world cinema. In order to help readers find my writing on particular films, I created a "Film Diary Menu," which provides an alphabetized index. Notice that this "menu" is actually just a regular ol' blog post, back-dated to July 1, 2001. And it simply links to other blog posts. Whenever I post a new response to a film, I edit the old "Film Diary Menu" to add the film to the index.

By creating several of these sub-menu posts, and by linking to them from your blog template (as you would link to an external site on your blogroll), you can easily create a full-blooded web site.

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