I keep meaning to give a special mention to a few blogs featuring contributions by some of my talented friends and colleagues. Probably I should just break down and create a “links” page for this site at some point, but I have a really hard time keeping those at a manageable length. Also, I feel like just having a link to a page, while seemingly more permanent, doesn’t really pique my interest as a reader as much as a link offered with wholehearted endorsement in the context of a post. For now, then, let me tell you about a few of the blogs I’ve been meaning to mention.
On Media Theory
This blog was created by graduate students at Michigan State University, including Nicholas Bowman and Allison Eden, whom I met at last year’s game studies panels at ICA. (You may remember me describing Nick as someone you should hire to build mazes on top of your garage. More recently, I have decided that Allison is my new go-to person for novel recommendations.)
The blog includes contributions not just by MSU students, but also from researchers from other universities, including my friend and fellow Annenberger, Moira O’Keeffe. Recent discussions include a couple different takes on the recent Incredible Hulk movie (and what it says about popular understanding of media effects) and some discussion of interesting communication theories and findings.
Media Oracle
I was invited to contribute to this blog by CarrieLynn Reinhard, a grad student from Ohio State University. She is one of the few colleagues I met not at a big academic conference, but at a fan convention. I am indeed listed as a contributor to Media Oracle, but between writing about geeks and gaming here, writing very occasionally about policy at Shouting Loudly, and doing, you know, actual writing for the dissertation and papers and such, I tend to forget my name is on yet another blog. (I resist the urge to speculate about how many other blogs have I’d agreed to write for that I’ve forgotten about completely.)
The site features contributions from writers from academia and beyond, with lots of attention to the marketing and promotion of geeky pop culture. CarrieLynn’s been particularly active lately with links about viral marketing for The Dark Knight; other topics include musings about Wall-E, Speed Racer, and Nintendo.
free_geek
Last for today, but certainly not least, is the newly rebranded tsuibhne.net—formerly known as “Headphone Sacrament,” and now “free_geek.” Matt S. (a frequent commenter around here, Z.’s Hipster Please, and other nerdy venues) has decided to expand his focus to include not only music, but geek culture. This site hosts The Geek Culture Manifesto (still making the rounds on the web, I believe), The Geek Culture Debate (which I’m probably late to contributing to…), and posts about geeky activities where a discussion of convergence culture seems a fine fit. Matt’s blog is not “academic” in the same sense as those above in that his career isn’t tied to teaching and researching this stuff, but I’m sure you’ll find his commentary just as thoughtful and interesting.
I was about to launch into descriptions of half a dozen other sites, but I’ll leave those for another links post. Don’t take it personally if I haven’t gotten to yours yet. The combined greatness of the sites I read cannot be contained by any one post!
Geek Studies 
I’m honored to be included in the list. Thank you very much. And yes, you are seriously behind on the GCD.
Also, since you’re using WordPress, why not just do a series of these posts with the content of the posts copied into a Page that you link to from the sidebar? I agree that the descriptions of why the sites are listed gives increased value to the links (and not just because you said nice things about me), but doing posts like this makes it harder for people to find the information.
Actually, come to think of it, I may just do that for free_geek.
Hey, thanks for the shoutout. As usual, you provide some great links as well. free_geek has made it into my bookmark list based on the link to the wonderful filk-vid, “I’m going to Hogwarts.” Nice.
Matt:
Yeah, that makes sense, but whenever I start some kind of site update, I get sidetracked and then feel really guilty I’m not holed up in a bunker, writing my dissertation 24/7. I think I’ll make a number of changes around here all at once when I finish writing (in the hopes that this will be a more robust resource by the time that I start pitching it to some publisher as a book).