New Blog, and New Wiki

First, there's a new political philosophy blog, Public Reason. It's noteworthy not only because it has the potential to be good, but also because of their policy on authorship. Whereas most group blogs work on a "invite-only" system, Public Reason, so far as I can see, lets pretty much anyone past PhD level to write.

It seems that several different blogging styles have arisen, at least in the philosophy-blogging world. There are individual authors, such as myself and Richard Chappell (links to all blogs in sidebar). Then there are group blogs like Crooked Timber, with a small number (15) of long-time regular bloggers. This gives the site a sort of recognisable feel: one gets to know the style and views of the individual authors. Finally, some larger group blogs are appearing, particuarly PEA-soup and now Public Reason, which have a very large number of authors. This can possibly make the site feel somewhat disjointed as every time you visit there's a new writing style and topic being discussed. But these can of course be positive things too, and the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. I shall be interested to see how Public Reason turns out.

On a related note, I see that Wikipedia founder, Larry Sanger, is now working on a different project, Citizendium. He's described it thus: "imagine Wikipedia done right". As far as I can tell, it differs from wikipedia in that greater weight is given to expertise, and articles are "approved" and so on. You could say that it's wikipedia but less bottom-up. It's easy to see the merits of this, but part of what made wikipedia superior to other encyclopedias was the input from a large variety of perspectives.

I'm intrigued to see what happens here. Either citizendium will become the new internet encyclopedia, or otherwise it will have to find a niche small enough that people will remember to check it rather than wikipedia. Is that likely?

As always, thoughts welcome.