This is crazy!
panache62 founded abible community on LJ this summer which focuses on the study of the Bible and the intersection of faith and reason. On Sunday she made a post in response to a book review published by the Society of Biblical Literature (of which she is a member). In her post, she praised part of the book review, but also criticized certain aspects of it. Much to our surprise, this morning we discovered that the original scholar who wrote the book review had responded to her post! We think that he found it because her post includes a word that he has coined, which if you search for on Google, only turns up four hits, the third of which is her post!
I imagine that actively trying to get a scholar to respond to your post about him or her would rarely ever work, even after many, many attempts, but amazingly she got a response with a single post and without even trying! I don't think most scholars spend very much time Googling there coined words, though. For that matter, few scholars coin words. Anyway, I think that it's great that he responded because it shows that he took her post as a serious response to his work (unless he's just obsessive). In a world filled with polemical, ranting blogs, level-headed, critical blogs are a light shining in the darkness.
I imagine that actively trying to get a scholar to respond to your post about him or her would rarely ever work, even after many, many attempts, but amazingly she got a response with a single post and without even trying! I don't think most scholars spend very much time Googling there coined words, though. For that matter, few scholars coin words. Anyway, I think that it's great that he responded because it shows that he took her post as a serious response to his work (unless he's just obsessive). In a world filled with polemical, ranting blogs, level-headed, critical blogs are a light shining in the darkness.