The Absence of Teams In Production of Blog Journalism

Chris F. Masse April 19th, 2008

Justin Wolfers at Freakonomics published the link to an interesting paper, “The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge” [PDF file]:

The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge

We have used 19.9 million papers over 5 decades and 2.1 million patents to demonstrate that teams increasingly dominate solo authors in the production of knowledge. Research is increasingly done in teams across nearly all fields. Teams typically produce more frequently cited research than individuals do, and this advantage has been increasing over time. Teams now also produce the exceptionally high-impact research, even where that distinction was once the domain of solo authors. These results are detailed for sciences and engineering, social sciences, arts and humanities, and patents, suggesting that the process of knowledge creation has fundamentally changed.

Currently, any group blog (like Freakonomics or Midas Oracle) is in fact an aggregation of solo blogs —in the example above, Justin Wolfers wrote his blog post without the assistance of Steve Levitt (just like I’m writing this present blog post without the direct supervision of our Scientific Advisory Board chief Michael Giberson).

In the future, I foresee a process where a blog post could be written by at least 2 bloggers (i.e., 2 co-authors). I have looked into this issue, and concluded that WordPress is not yet ready for that. But it’s coming… It’s coming… Push… Push…

Technical Note on WordPress 2.5:

I regret that, in WordPress 2.5, it’s now impossible to sort post archives by blog author. WordPress is written by young white males who don’t have any experience with group blogs and blog communities.
The usability bozos who overhauled the WordPress administration menus decided that you now have to click on a post/comment title to edit it —thus breaking the Web convention which says that you click on a weblink to open it, not to edit it. … I’m not the only one having trouble with this.