on August 6, 2008 by lieven in general, rants, Comments (7)
the future of this blog
Conceptual blog-proposals
- bloomsday 2 : BistroMath
- the future of this blog
- the future of this blog (2)
- the future of… (3)
Some weeks ago Peter Woit of Not Even Wrong and Bee of Backreaction had a video-chat on all sorts of things (see the links above to see the whole clip) including the nine minute passage below on ‘the future of (science) blogs’.
The crucial point being that blogging takes time and that one often feels that the time invested might have been better spend doing other things. Bee claims it doesn’t take her that long to write a post, but given their quality, I would be surprised if it took her less than one to two hours on average.
Speaking for myself, I’ve uploaded two (admittedly short) notes to the arXiv recently. The shorter one took me less time than an average blogpost, the longer one took me about the time I need for one of the better posts. So, is it really justified to invest that amount of time in something as virtual as a blog?
Probably it all depends on the type of blog you’re running and what goal (if any) you want to achieve with it.
I can see the point in setting up a blog connected to a book you once wrote or intend to write (such as Not Even Wrong or Terry Tao).
I can also understand that people start a blog to promote their research-topic or to have a social function for people interested in the same topic (such as Noncommutative Geometry or the n-category cafe).
I can even imagine the energy boost resulting from setting up a group-blog with fellow researchers working at the same place (such as Secret Blogging Seminar or the Everything Seminar and some others).
So, there are plenty of good reasons to start and keep investing in a serious mathematical blog (as opposed to mere link-blogs (I won’t mention examples) or standard-textbook-excerpts-blogs (again, I’ll refrain from giving examples)).
What is needed is either a topical focus or a clear medium term objective. Unfortunately, this blog has neither…
At present, I feel like the journalist, spending too much time getting into a subject merely to write a short piece on it for today’s paper, which will be largely forgotten by tomorrow, but still hoping that his better writings will result into something having a longer half-life…
That is, I need to reconsider the future of this blog and will do so over a short vacation. As always, suggestions you might have are welcome. Perhaps I should take the bait offered by John McKay in his comment yesterday and do a series on the illusory 24-dimensional monster-manifold.
At the very least it would take this blog back to the only time when it was somewhat focussed on a single topic and was briefly called MoonshineMath. But then, even this is not without risks…
Hi, I'm a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. My research areas are non-commutative algebra and non-commutative geometry. Sometimes, you can also find me here :
Kea
August 6, 2008 @ 9:03 pm
Oh, but your blog is a moonshine blog! It’s the only real moonshine blog on the web. It’s unique, and I’m sure many people read it and get a lot out of it. I would be very disappointed if you gave it up. But of course, if you would rather spend your time elsewhere, that is perfectly understandable, so good luck.
Maurizio
August 7, 2008 @ 1:42 pm
I agree, your blog is unique and it has a big value providing glimpes of very difficult subjects that i may achieve only talking with an expert of the field or going through difficult and technical papers. For instance, i wonder on which other blog i may have found your somewhat-informal explaination of the F_1 stuff, surely not on NCG.com, where much more technical matters are discussed, and i would say also not on all the PhD-student’s-blogs on the web. And it was a well worth reading. Thanks!
Florin
August 7, 2008 @ 8:03 pm
My vote goes to…Moonshine! On the other hand, you should not avoid writing short posts on various occasional subjects, for instance ones that might be useful and informative for the readers (such as the series “Vacation reading”).
mark a. thomas
August 7, 2008 @ 10:24 pm
I can attest as per the picture of the van that moonshine can kill, maim or blind. Unwitting souls can sink into a miasma or a black hole from which it is difficult to recover if they ever attempt its numerology. Not for the faint of heart, moonshine madness is real and can ruin your family or personal life.
Kea
August 8, 2008 @ 1:28 am
Heh, heh. But the world would be pretty boring without some crazy people, wouldn’t it?
beans
August 10, 2008 @ 2:01 am
I agree that writing serious mathematical posts takes quite a lot of time, which is why I probably tend to write more “journaly” type of posts narrating my experiences (mathematical and non-mathematical of course!) A twenty minute post sometimes becomes a two hour post! (Especially if it is stats which you decide to blog about…)
Nevertheless, as a student, those posts which I did spend time writing about Maths have definitely helped me. I don’t necessarily agree with the topical focus of a blog part. It really depends on why you blog. You can always change focus whenever you want, or for as long as you want.
Christine
September 13, 2008 @ 10:17 pm
A unique blog, no doubt.
It’s not easy to run a serious blog, with instructive posts…
I often ask myself why I am keeping a blog, if I do not have enough time to make it a really useful blog. I do not know why I have a blog. If I had the knowledge, however, I would very much appreciate to maintain a math blog, like this one, or Terence Tao’s, for instance.