Geeky blogs and academic work - a good match?

In a conversation with Stephan at Tinseltown over a rather nice glass of milkshake, he told me he investigated the use of blogs in academic research -- and the little ant only told me this now.

He even published two papers on the subject (!) available on his webpage.

That made me
1) remind me that I have a blog
2) think why I stopped writing.

Number 1) brought me here today to try to answer number 2). I think -- and Stephan's studies confirmed -- that is because I don't have a reason to write. In fact, I do, but I am writing somethin else (the thesis).

I guess that if I had used this blog to communicate with my supervisor, i.e., if I had made this blog available and that he could read and comment on my posts, it could have been interesting. But how much of my thesis would I really want published on the web? How much of my line of thinking would I want exposed to people I don't know. And, considering I have an external host, how much of their identity would I have given away?

During the first part of this research I didn't have anything concrete to write about, and a lot of anxiety to be ejected from my system. So I think that writing had this main function. At the moment I re-directed the anxiety to somewhere else, the blog lost its function.

I think it would be really useful, though, if I was working with someone else on the project. for two reasons:

1) We are not always in the same room, so it is nice to be able to communicate online. But what are emails for. That leads me to two:

2) Conversations over comments are organized and restricted to specific themes. I find that in emails people feel free to go astray, because it is like a little letter you are writing to someone. You can include lots of "BTWs", like "what are you doing tomorrow", "did you see Heroes yesterday?" or "I hate the weather", which can lead to other infinite, non-related topics (specially the last one, if your partner is English).

Need to refine these thoughts, but this is a very interesting topic.