The main thing I came away from this blog with was how important peer review is to academics. Since a large portion of publishing seems connected to career advancement, peer review seems necessary to ensure that the process is as fair as possible. While I’m sure that our peers cannot verify all aspects of our work, including sources and citation, they can still help keep obviously fraudulent material from being published and advancing someone’s academic career. The importance of peer review for public historians is more of a gray area. I don’t know if their are any official mechanism’s to ensure accuracy among public historians or if it is even possible.
As to my response to the blog I can’t say it was very captivating. While I like pirates as much as the next person, I didn’t find reading about someone researching a pirate all that interesting.