Usability Views Article Details  home | timeline | recent | popular | e-reports | userati | books | about  Inside the ivory tower (23 Sep 2004) Academic researchers are drawn to blogs because they're useful knowledge management tools. MacCallum-Stewart says that her site quickly became a kind of "mind gym", a place to test out and develop ideas and to hone her prose style. The social networking side of blogging became very important here, she says. Her blog helped her build links and share ideas with researchers in the area at other universities. More interestingly, her blog has drawn in non-academic readers. Writing every day for them - making sure her arguments on current popular myths about the first world war are clear and concise - has helped her prose style, she says. "I think I write in a more accessible, less academic way now," she says. The sense of connecting with a larger public is important, she adds. "You get so obsessed with a thesis. It's just you most of the time, so to be able to talk about it to all sorts of people is very useful." Article URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,1310111,00.html Read 43 more articles from guardian.co.uk sorted by date, popularity, or title. Next Article: Review: Macromedia Flex and Flex Builder     This site is a labour of love built by Chris McEvoy