“Inside the influential new world of econoblogging”

Here is the very good Boston Globe article, which focuses mostly on the financial crisis.  Excerpt:

In a sense, economics was a field made for blogging: Its ideas advance
by disputatious back-and-forth, and not surprisingly these professors
took to gently (or not so gently) mocking one another's writings, even
engaging in lengthy arguments that stretched out over days, if not
weeks.

And:

"Any major blogger who makes a mistake is corrected in five minutes,"
says Cowen. Yves Smith agrees: "It's a version of the Wikipedia effect,
with people correcting each other."

Addendum: Our apologies, typepad comments are down for this entry (only).  I have to run out this moment but I'll set up at least a temporary fix for tomorrow's Keynes symposium, part I.  What typepad is doing is trying to switch to a new system.  Every time they switch it turns off comments for some bloggers (but not all).  They switch back to the old system and comments are fine again but a few days later they try out the new system again, etc.  Sorry!  They really do need to get this problem solved.