'[T]he [history] blogs offer a new level of conversation and information about our beloved discipline. Taken together, moreover—and it's proper to do that, since they list and respond to one another, and the same posters and lurkers move from one to another—they have created something like a virtual café in cyberspace, one where the conversation is extremely lively and you can learn a great deal simply by listening in.

... Dozens of historians, from undergraduates to senior historians, now keep blogs. Some blog anonymously, some reveal their names; some concentrate on scholarly and professional subjects, but many discuss personal matters as well.

... As vice president of the AHA's Professional Division, I have a professional deformation of my own: I'm tasked to seek out areas where the institutions of history, and the universities that house them, don't work as well as they should, and look for modest, practical ways of improving matters. A number of blogs offer particularly incisive commentary on these matters. Tenured Radical, for example, has analyzed in depth, and with the freedom that this genre allows, the failings of the current tenure system (so has the English professor Margaret Soltan, whose University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it).'