I’ve just blogrolled Alex Halavais – for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he just went and whipped up a little script that scoops out the 8th-to-last sentences of blog posts, generating a collective stream of consciousness mimetic literature much like the wee bibliomancy craze of last week does. The results are intriguing and nifty. Secondly, he’s gone out and tried to aggregate the various lists of phd/academic bloggers that exist on various websites and blogs – the result is the publicly editable Scholars who Blog list.

In an unrelated epiphany, I realised that there has to be a word for the terrible feeling of discomfort I get when I realise that a third of my site visitors are search engine refugees who come here in the Googlejuice induced belief that I have some sort of insights to impart in the areas of postmodern architecture or swarm theory. The name for this uneasy feeling has to be… Googleguilt, does it not?

I’m wondering if experiencing guilt on this score is an academic thing – or is it just me? Any thoughts?