Rescue Tenure from the Monograph

“Rescue Tenure From the Tyranny of the Monograph” by Lindsay Waters in The Chronicle of Higher Education argues that we are spewing out too many second-rate books as we force new scholars to publish one or two to get tenure. His remedy is to return to a few excellent essays for tenure and to publish fewer books that are full of “gusto” (accessible and moving to a larger audience.)
The realities of the pressures to get tenure are unlikely to change, so I doubt the community can easily change course, but what if the form in which early publishing took place were changed? What if blogs, wikis, discussion list participation, and other forms of social/network writing were assessed. Early in a career is when academics should be writing with and for others in order to establish their network of ideas. Books can come later out of what has been tested in the creative common.
How would one assess quality (and quantity) for such writing? I can think of some bibliometric methods (Google as tenure tool), but they would be crude and easy to manipulate. Ideas?
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The Listening Post

The Listening Post is a networked installation that culls text from online and displays them and synthesizes them.
This looks anticipates a project on the sonification of text that I am working on with Bill Farkas who has developed some cool sonification systems.

txtkit – Visual Text Mining

txtkit – Visual Text Mining Tool is a Mac OS 10.3 networked application that lets you visualize and interact with texts through a command line interface and visualizations. The visualizations, if I understand them, weave the text and user behaviour together with information about other users. It produces some of the most beautiful visualizations I have seen for a while.

See also their Related Links.