Now I doubt that anything like THE NEW YORK REVIEW will emerge over the current state of blog content. Let’s face it, for most of the bloggers out there, the blog is the easiest form of vanity press; so it would be a waste of everyone’s time to write about this sort of thing the way THE NEW YORK REVIEW writes about Niall Ferguson’s latest book. As to what I write in my own blog, I certainly recognize the vanity factor; but what counts more for me is the “rehearsal” factor. Since I still put a lot of work into writing for peer-reviewed publications, I like having a nice hypertext environment in which I can work out half-baked thoughts while linking them to their relevant sources. This becomes a useful resource when I then set myself to my REAL writing. (I used to write into Usenet newsgroups the same way.) It also affords me the discipline of writing SOMETHING every day (on the average), even if it is a commonplace-book entry of a quotation that really appeal to me.