Metamedia

Metamedia launched Archaeolog in October of 2005. At first the unpolished ideas and commentary of 2 or 3 'archaeologers', archaeolog has now grown to encompass more than 40 regular contributors from North America and Europe.

An archaeolog, or blog for all things archaeological, has been part of Metamedia's e-publishing since 2003. At that time a few other, very early weblogs or static .html pages - most notably Internet Archaeology - were dedicated to publication of archaeological interests of/on the internet. Even a few early commentators - like Julian Richards or Christopher Chippindale - knew that digital publication would change how information and ideas are shared by archaeologists. Since these early days, a host of specialty blogs have appeared for those interested in archaeology. The digital media necessary to launch a blog are inexpensive - even free depending upon your server scenario. Indeed, part of the open-source initiative begun in Silicon Valley has the radically democratic ideal of making self-expression through software available to anyone. And since the 2004 US presidential election, blogs have become effective at offering an alternative to the widely held perception in the States that mainstream media is unreliable and biased. News to/from the people. Now every reputable mainstream news source - from BBC to CNN - integrates a blog component to their news casts. Without enlisting bloggers, and other new media such as Facebook, a would-be President of the US would be sorely lacking in funding. Grass roots organization and mobilization.

This has all been relatively good. For archaeology, publishers are, understandably, a bit nervous about what this portends for academic book sales. Questions of peer-review, quality and content control, and legitimacy come to mind. These questions should be taken seriously; but they can also be seen as established interests worried about financial futures and gate-keeping in academia. Suffice it to say, most new media theorists argue that the digital is no substitute for the physical and real. It augments various qualities - capture, distribution and storage, for instance. So traditional publishers ought to be rest assured that there is no substitute for book-in-the-hands. What will occur are strategies to mix traditional and digital components of publication. Books will be printed, but they'll be supplemented by new media tools, such as additional images or full resolutions databases of images (which are prohibitively expensive to print), sound bytes or podcasts of interviews, YouTube video shorts and even commentary/community pages (all only made possible by new media).

With so many archaeology blogs out there now - and more appearing daily - the onerous on e-publishers is consistency and longevity. Quality should go without saying. But a blog or other e-publication environment must remain reliable. This gets them into users' rss feeds and other aggregates so that they become a habitual source of interest and information. Other distinguishing characteristics could be listed about e-publication. The one that really matters for academics, however, is a function of analog publication constraints. With near instant posting, commenting and reviewing in these collaborative authoring architectures, a digital journal cuts the production time down to a week or less. This means that e-publication can outpace the dated articles which appear in traditional journals - which often take a year - or sometimes more! - to surface after they are submitted. Accelerating debate and the sharing of ideas and information. This will be the great utility of e-publication over the next few years. And archaeolog will be part of archaeology's digital future.