spoiling the blogger broth

Team blogs, I think, have not been analyzed enough using the concepts and findings from the sociological literature that have been done of intentional communities (e.g., residential co-ops, communes, cultish-free-love-shacks of one form or another).  Since I have no great familiarity with this literature, don't expect such an analysis to come from me.  However, there is a great experiment happening right now here in Madison Sociology.  The graduate students have recently started a team blog with a lot of participants, and their only executive decision has been that all of them get full administrative privileges to the blog.  Already there seems to be a squabble where people have been changing the name of the blog back and forth from "at wisc dot edu" to "dot wisc dot edu" (neither of which is particularly compelling, but the latter being plainly superior in my view).  So one can sit and watch whether this devolves into chaos.  Or, alternatively, one can also see whether this devolves into boredom and a lack of posting inside of two weeks, which is of course the modal fate of team blogs regardless of how they allocate administrative privileges.

(originally guest-posted to Pub Sociology)