I think blogging and other publishing does "undermine" writing in the traditional sense. But there is not stopping the Internet (as the music and movie industry is finding out) Publishing for "free" is the future, which means writers need to find ways to make their money indirectly off publishing.  The Net allows anyone to publish for free and many, like myself, do for reasons other than getting paid for the piece.

Its not unlike those who publish in professional journals. They are not paid for their articles but the reward is in professional prestige and in many cases a requirement to keep their jobs. There was also a time when musicians didnt make money off record sales, most of their money was from concerts. Records were a form of promotion. Even today, while you can get the music (albeit illegally) for free, people will still shell out big bucks for concert tickets (tho personally the reasons for this are beyond me).

In the long run, I think it is publishers that have more to worry about than good writers. Good writing builds reputations and good reputations lead to lucrative opportunties.

I'm not sure how this would work for our industry. But I believe that the music industry should flip it's view on how it makes money. Originally, artists would tour to promote record sales. Now I believe they must start recording to promote tour ticket sales.  I also know of an artist that sells music directly to the fans, in fact the catch is she will make you a CD with the 10 songs of your choice from her catelog. And calls the Album, 10 4 [YOUR NAME] and fans pay more than they would for a regular album for this special personalized CD, rather than passing music for free among themselves.

For our field, I think we are seeing the very beginnings of what will happen right here.  Having a solid online presence (blogs, forums, websites etc) can give perspective employers a very good idea of the kind of teacher they can get. Probably much better than from a CV and even a statement of teaching philosophy. These two documents are important, but if you can google someone and find out the s/he has produced both in the way of materials, research and/or contributions to discussions about education, you can get a really good sense of what someone is all about... much more so than with a one-time document that we all know is written only to try to impress (mostly).

Colleges are beginning to google perspective students, which is why there have been warnings to the younger generation as to how they present themselves on line. Someone who really wants to can dig up what you put on your Facebook page 2-3 years ago, even though you rewrote it in the most flattering way in time for that application to Harvard.

I have noticed that more and more people use their real names (or some variation of it) online (including me). Do you remember not so long ago when almost no one did this for fear of cyberstalkers? I think this has changed because most feel the networking value of the Internet outweighs the risk of a crazy hunting you (Im kind of fatalistic about this to tell the truth.) I think that for those of us who build an online presence do it for networking and/or prestige, and it can lead to paying gigs. Ive seen this happen at a number of (non-teaching) blogs that I follow. Exceptionally good bloggers get offers do write something for money.

Maybe someday blogging, materials sharing, etc. will be the equivalent of "publish or perish" for teachers as journal articles are for researchers.

This is a fascinating topic and some days I think it'll all be free and then the next day I wonder, if it's free, then where does the value in the value exchange (i.e. money) end up? Who gets it? Why not the authors? I understand the music biz model, where free music drives live performance sales...maybe free content would drive online class sales for teachers? I go back and forth.

But we had to make a decision about this in our collaborative teaching/authoring platform project. I went back and forth some more, but then decided that I question the whole user-generated content model, where the platform owner (e.g. google/youtube) gets the (usually ad) revenue and the content contributors get indirect value if any. So we set our thing up so that we re-distribute revenue among every contributor - every author gets paid according to page views....kind of a "community of commerce" concept (the equivalent would be youtube uploaders getting a cut of ad revenue by total views of the video they did). No idea if it'll work out though... but I figured it'd be better to over-share than the opposite. If a multinational company is paying for our Pro version, then everyone contributing gets a share.

From another perspective it's just a self-publishing service for teachers and schools. 

Dear Nik

I was thinking about that very thing the other day and wondering. I guess there are so many free- bees around esp in ELT market that one might not need a single book to purchase in the future. But then I am sometimes being asked by friends and colleagues if I do something for free i.e. volunteer why for God's sake I do this. Not easy to explain though. I was wondering whether the market will become even more competitive with more free thingies to find on the net. Or just maybe everybody will take up publishing as in this "Vanity publishing gone mad" quote that eventually Ss would not be able to winnow the chuff.

 Natasha

A comment from a publisher: I work as the vice editor-in-chief of a Russian publishing house that specialises in publishing ELT materials and textbooks for Russian schools, so I can see the situation as both a teacher and a publisher. First of all, no matter how large/great a book you publish, there is never enough material there for some people, and the authors are usually left with all sorts of bits, ends, exercises and texts that they could not include into the textbook. Publishing such additional materials online and providing free access to them helps to popularise the textbook, promote the author AND the book and in general to provide support for the teachers who are using these textbooks. Teachers' comments to such online publications generate (if only sometimes) new ideas on how an existing textbook can be improved or what really needs to be added to the printed version (or, sometimes, what could be taken out of it, which also makes the book cheaper). As a teacher, every time I publish online any of the materials that I've developed and see people reacting to them very positively, this helps me to understand better what types of materials are needed, which ones work better and which ones will be used by most teachers. In this way I am using the experience of many teachers to find my way around. A year ago we've set up a profesisonal forum for Russian ELT teachers at www.englishteachers.ru (most of it is in Russian, but there are topics which are entirely in English) and over these 14 months we've got over 5500 people join the forum and plenty of people ready to share their materials, which, I think, demonstrates that there is a real need both to read and to self-publish such materials online.