Kåre, Palm, Philo, and biblioblogs....

I have been eagerly waiting for a picture of Kare, sliding down the mountains at Fauske at Easter (see his post below), but he probably did not have a photographer available... Well, to be honest, this is just another way of stating that I am envious; he is having a Palm, I don't......I have wanted one for a long time, but other things have had to get a priority. Wish I had a rich uncle....

But it is also an opportunity to partly explain the silence of this blog in the last weeks; not only is the Norwegian Easter exceptionally long (over a week), but I have been sick for almost two weeks, and have not yet recovered..... And before that I was almost exhausted by all the packing and unpacking related to our moving. I'm getting old (hysj...)

These few comments above are also triggered by some postings by Jim West and Mark Goodacre on the dis-integration of biblioblogs. The observations of Jim are not surprising; the growth of blogs held by a wide range of people, from students to older scholars, focusing on topics wide and small, makes the blogdom a wide field to follow, not to say to interact with.

My dreams are still about some major biblioblogs, sponsored by major organizations, and authored and maintained by established schoolars, focusing on some quite specific biblical fields. Thus these could be peaks in the field of biblical scholarship on the Net. When everyone becomes a biblioblogger just because he or she focus on some topics relevant to the Bible, what has then become of biblical scholarship?

I have a uneasy feeling that the amount of biblioblogs, and the lack of some major ones, will in some time lead to the lack of interest in the phenomenon as such. And finally the death of biblioblogs to spend time on. Who wants to read through a lot of blogs that are so comprehensive in scope that you can not understand from its name what the purpose or focus is, and not knowing the scholarly status of the writer? For my own part, I know I do not have the time for such readings, even though I use Bloglines..

But for the time being, I'll still try to stick to my Philo.