So who else is doing what I'm doing?

Most of the blogs I read are personal blogs by academics, but most are anonymous. The names academic blogs I read stick to professional issues. There are some exceptions, though. I'm not the only professor writing about personal issues under his real name.

Scrivener is an English professor at GIT. He seems like an even-tempered dude, though, who is not running the risk of offending anyone. On the other hand, he did dye his hair green.

Locals know well sociology professor Bob Torres, whose blogs under his own name and has actually caused controversy when he referred to the group Campus Republicans as racist and fascist. Although he was referring to the national organization and not his immediate students, many campus conservative took offense.

[By the way can anyone else get to Bob and Jenna's website? Is it down in general, or just blocked from campus?]

By personal temperament, I am more like Bob Torres, but I hope the blog works out more like Scriv's, with cute family pictures and discussions of poetry and things academic.

PZ Myers is an interesting case. Although he blogs mostly on biology, he says really harsh things about conservatives and is militantly atheistic. To my knowledge, this has not hurt his ability to teach, though.

Update: Of course the bigest academic doing personal blogging under his own name is Michael Bérubé. Perhaps I should read him more often.

Updated update: Yes, I really should read Bérubé more often. Check out this description of Joseph Epstein

He is more often considered a master of the genre of the personal essay—so widely that at one point in the 1990s I began to wonder whether Epstein had secretly copyrighted the phrase and had had it contractually sutured to his name in some way (you know, Michael Jackson took “King of Pop,” and Epstein took “master of the personal essay”).

"Contractually sutured" he he.