This weekend I received two emails from two different colleagues that contained links to materials relevant to Academic Commons. The first was to symfony (http://symfonyvideo.org/), a project at Syracuse University to share video materials a la YouTube. The second was a story of how the entire editorial board of Topology resigned in protest over the cost that Elsevier charges for access to their journal. Both my colleagues know about Academic Commons. They even have accounts on the server. Neither chose to post their links to the site.

As we go around the country talking with various audiences about Academic Commons, one of the main things we talk about is how the Commons—like all Commons, both virtual and real-world—requires people to change their habits. In the case of my two colleagues, I am trying to convince them that instead of sending an email out to a small group of people on campus, why not take a few extra moments to write a brief posting that can reach the 800 or so visitors that come to our site each day? And may, by virtue of the magic of the blog-o-sphere, make its way into post upon post upon post and thousands of eyeballs? As we slowly wean ourselves from email as our main way of staying informed (newsletters, tables of contents for journals, alerts, notes with links from friends and colleagues, etc.) and transistion to using blog/rss aggregation services to serve this function, perhaps more people will stop sending email and start posting their links to interesting, relevant materials, leaving their reactions as comments in the blog-o-sphere. And yet there is a tendency for bloggers to be solo acts. We thought we could be SlashDot for Higher Ed. But perhaps most who take the plunge to blogging want to do it on their own?

When we began the Academic Commons project, we knew it would take time to build up a readership, to build awareness, to become a destination that people would depend on for useful, relevant material. We also believed that people would want to use the site as a vehicle to share the interesting things that they encounter in their inboxes and their aggregators, on the radio and in the local bookstore. That the act of writing a few sentences to contextualize, deconstruct, criticize or celebrate would be an activity that would help us all make sense of how technology is changing, for better or worse, the ends and means of liberal education (along with everything else). If the small group of us who are trying to prop up the regular feed of new materials ever want to rest, the 1% rule suggests that we need to grow our readership. But it may take more than that.

For those of you who read, but don't post, why don't you post? What information gathering and sharing habits do you have that you would need to change to have this space fit into your world? (Hint: try using the comment feature below.)