Alan Levine has a nice piece on using blog citations, from which this is an excerpt:
There is a lot to be said by looking at the patterns of communication on the Web- seeing who responds to a specific posting is a neat way of taking the highway of serendipity to finding new blog voices, of taking a pulse on the sphere, of increasing our connectedness.
www.bloglines.com/citations?url=[insert URL here]&submit=Search
Point is, this feature/capability allows us to make the echoes of an article or a posting into a subject for analysis, and offers a constructive answer to the question ?Why would I want to mess with blogging? Alan Levine addresses this in terms that should appeal to faculty members dubious about the medium:
What new ideas emerge? What modes of argument are used? Abused? There are all kinds of social learning activities nestled in this one thin slice of web activity.