Spender's idea is inextricably tied to a larger question about what counts in academic publishing; and, in a social collaborative approach to invention, decisions about what ideas to accept or reject and what to value in professional discourse will be based more and more on interactive social consensus.

And the web provides a vehicle for intrinsically different kinds of writing to be considered by professional communities; work which once was inaccessible to all but the closest circles, and which often came to be seen as "drudge" work, is now on the verge of being included in what is possible -- what counts.

Consider, for example, the strategy I was able to employ in designing a class for the Rensselaer Department of Language, Literature and Communication in the Spring of 1996. The class, called Writing to the World-Wide Web, was the first of its kind in the department, and needed to be built from scratch. I was fortunate that, at the same time Writing to the Web was approved at RPI, similar classes to it were also approved at about two dozen other institutions throughout the country. Steve Krause, then of Bowling Green, took the opportunity to collect and list URLs for the syllabi (some have used the unfortunate term "syllawebs") to these various classes all in one "clearinghouse" site.

So as I was designing and implementing my class, I was able to reference the excellent work being done in similar areas by Wayne Butler and Becky Rickly at Michigan, by Eric Crump at Missouri, by Nick Carbone at Marlboro State, and many others. Similarly, they were able to reference what I was doing.

Krause's site (as this one aspires to do) became exactly what Spender referred to -- a forum for referencing collective ideas ... using that traditionally dreaded task of writing a syllabus as a starting point. Again, I would argue that this is a reflection of a kind of timeliness not often available in traditional papertextual environments. But how should it count?