I started blogging in October 2006, probably as the first board-level central banker ever moving into blogosphere. My experience after these few months is very positive, a number of blogs I read offer good insight into current economic issues, but also into the various aspects of economic theory. I think that by sharing knowledge we become more productive as a group. I have recently added Mark Thoma Economist’s view to my blog-roll. It offers good review of important articles written by respected economists, also the discussion there is useful, the amount of comments is reasonable. In some other economists’ blogs there are dozens fo comments, some of them really useless, so my view is that in such situation comments should be moderated. Maybe a model developed in Martin Wolf blog (also added to my blog-roll) is worth considering, where you have a number of trusted bloggers (well-known economists in the case of Martin Wolf blog) while the “crowd” is moderated. One possible weakness of this model is that progress is often generated by allowing young gereration to question rules established by the previous generation. It applies also to economics profession.

Blogosphere is a very useful tool of knowledge and information. In the past months in many discussions I found that I did have information advantage. For example someone argues that certain relationships holds, while I am able to respond instantly by suggesting that it is not the case as documented by three or four recent papers. I would not be able to do this without blogospere bringing to my RSS-attention important events or papers. But blogosphere also brings several problems. There is an overwhelming amount of information, so I encounter a significant selection problem, what should I read, what should I skip. Sometimes I also have to skip something that is important, (for example written by respected economist) becasue of time constraints, which makes me feel bad. I do not know what state of mind is better, not knowing that something important was written, or being aware of important contribution, and having no time to read it. I would be interested how other blogging economists manage their reading list? How they select information and knowledge brought to their RSS-attention?