Blogscholars?

I share Unfogged's puzzlement. The-blog-as-scholarship question has come up now and again in the blogosphere, and I've been more convinced by the "nays" than the "yeas." You can certainly make a good case for blogging as an updated version of the epistolary and social networks built by scholars in the early modern period, of the sort studied by Anne Goldgar, but one node in a community does not a work of scholarship make. Like academic listservs, academic blogs are conducive to conversation--dialogue about this point or that--but, really, are they good for developing extensive and in-depth arguments on significant topics? A blogger without reasonably frequent posts is a blogger without readers, as a general rule, and "extensive and in-depth arguments" can hardly be posted frequently (or, if frequently, not well). It's true that some bloggers manage to do the first phases of scholarship on their blog--throwing out ideas, talking about them with like-minded folks, and so forth--but such activities in and of themselves are the building-blocks of intellectual life in general. There are a number of academic bloggers who do an excellent job of talking about their scholarship, but that again is not in and of itself "scholarly activity": it's like writing an abstract for a book or conference paper. And, as Matt Weiner points out in Unfogged's comments, there's nobody to stop you from blogging something inane or just plain wrong (although there are plenty of people out there who, after the fact, will gladly point out that you've done so). That said, there are a number of bloggers out there who could probably claim credit for their blogs as service credit (e.g., running a blog dedicated to the activities of a professional society) or teaching credit (e.g., developing a group blog for classroom use). But blogging's appeal--the ability to post "to the moment," to write informally and without the intervention of an editor, to interact immediately with an audience, and so forth--seems, if anything, to militate against the kind of ongoing work (and, quite frankly, real drudgery) involved in scholarship. You can get instant gratification from a blog post, but not from that article on Emily Sarah Holt you've been writing for the past two years.

UPDATE: The terms of this discussion--"scholarship," "scholarly activity," etc.--should be understood in their purely professional sense, not their more general sense. "Thinking out loud," after all, is part of the scholarly enterprise, but you don't list it on your annual report. (Updated in response to this thoughtful response.)