John Robb takes a look at DSpace, and responds: “Earth to MIT, give everyone a Radio weblog.“ OK, so Robb has a product to sell, he's perfectly entitled to bang the drum a bit. But that doesn't stop him being wrong.

Weblogs are fun, and interesting, and a very neat way of exchanging timely information in a decentralised environment. But they have some significant weaknesses that make them unsuitable for the task of providing a repository of academic research:

• Very time-constrained. Weblogs are organised chronologically. Posts fade from the blogosphere rapidly. DSpace acts more as a directory, where writing is organised into collections and communities.
• Limited metadata. Generally, the post is all there is.
• Limited workflow. The emphasis is on getting the post out there as quickly as possible, and then moving on, which is anathema to the process of producing a scholarly paper.
• Ad-hoc quality control. A weblog post becomes prominent through what is essentially a big linking popularity contest. Introducing a Google search appliance (as Robb suggests) makes that even more an issue.

For example, I'd really like to harness the l33t sk1llz of the java.blogs community to create a centralised repository of our collective knowledge. All the information is out there on various weblogs, but its diffuse and mixed together with stories about our cats. A central site would give a newcomer the distilled core. I went as far as downloading and installing DSpace, to see if it could be useful. Perhaps after I've finished my manic week of studying I'll have more time to mess around with it.

It's not an either-or situation. Encouraging academics to use weblogs is a Good Thing, because weblogs are a great tool for freeform information-sharing. On the other hand, an organised, centralised repository can very effectively complement the informal distributed cloud. Weblogs are not the solution to every information architecture problem, any more than a hammer is the solution to every carpentry problem.