One of my favorite subjects and probably most briefly studied in college was Economics. It is one of the courses that I think everyone should take at least a little of or should read up on in their own time. That said I like to keep a couple Economics blogs in my RSS reader just to see the views Economists have on whatever is going on (not surprisingly they have a lot to say right now). I also like to get a few different perspectives so I usually read Paul Krugman in the Times, Marginal Revolution which is a couple different Economists, and Greg Mankiw’s blog. Krugman is a Nobel laureate in Economics, Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) is a prof at George Mason and writes for the NYT, Alex Tabarrok (Marginal Revolution) is also a George Mason prof, and Greg Mankiw is a Harvard prof and author of the best selling intro Econ textbook.

So now the point of this is that Mankiw’s blog now has a great tie in done by the publisher of his textbook. The publisher went through his blog and made a “blog map” tying blog posts to specific citations in the textbook. Its pretty cool considering that the idea behind Mankiw’s blog is to keep students of Economics up to date with contemporary examples. Now I have no idea what the back end is like on the “blog map” but you can imagine how this could be seamlessly integrated in a very semantic way. For example tags on blog posts could auto update to the relevant citations on the map, certain phrases could trigger citation/tagging automatically, and on the textbook end you could imagine that sections be tagged in an electronic form as they are added in new additions thus updating citations throughout the blog map even with older posts. The awesome part is that you can really see the value added to the textbook. By linking it to the blog you basically get continuous additions by Mankiw making the value of his authorship continual rather than finite.