Harvard Economics professor Greg Mankiw announced today that his publisher has put together a “blog map” which outlines relevant content on his blog and maps it to parts of his widely-used Economics textbooks.  As far as I know, this is one of the first effective instances of fresh online content being integrated with curriculum textbooks in a way that actually makes sense and students may actually find beneficial.

I’ve used Dr. Makiw’s textbooks in courses and I’ve been an avid reader of his blog since late 2006, so seeing him be one of the first to try and bridge the gap is a really refreshing thing to see.  Frequently, publishers push new and expensive textbook editions on professors and students but this new path of providing relevant content on an on-going basis without charging for it is maybe one crack in that model that I hope will spread.  I highly recommend both Dr. Mankiw’s blog and his books if you are at all interested in economics, something that I suppose more and more people are getting interested in these days.