Jean Robillard: blogger

My colleague Jean Robillard started a blog [in French]. How good is it? The blog is still a young project, but I’m sure you’ll agree that Jean is a very powerful writer, if you can read French, that is. I think he published at least one book in the recent past too. Jean is one of the most interesting colleague I have and he is not even in a related discipline… we should really be total strangers… but he has things to say and he is not scared to tell them. In short, he’s got a brain and the guts to use it.

There are many types of blogs. Some people blog about their cats, some people blog about life in general, some people blog about the news… and then you have research blogs. My blog has been described in the blogosphere as an academic or research blog so I’ve been wondering what it means exactly to have a “research blog”. Jean is quite clear that his blog is a research blog.

You have at least 3 types of research blogs (this is, of course, simplistic):

1. Blogs about the process of doing research: often written by struggling Ph.D. students;
2. Blogs about para-research issues: posts written by a researcher who doesn’t focus on his specific fields of interest, but tries to address a wide, but not entirely general, range of interests.
3. Blogs about a given narrow field (nuclear physics, geometry, history, and so on);

My dream would be to have a type 3 blog, but my blog is really a type 2. You could never really learn much about my research results from blogs. You’ve got to go read my papers (which I periodically link to). However, you can learn a lot about what goes on in my mind and what motivates my work. My blog is about the ideas I cannot put in my papers nor can I put in my courses. It is about everything I would not write about if I didn’t have a blog. My blog is also therapeutic in a way: in a class room or in a scientific paper, emotions should not dominate, yet, my blog is very much about how I feel about things. I will criticize very harshly the Semantic Web on my blog, but I would never do the same in a research paper or in a course.

I could be wrong, but it looks like Jean is going for a type 3 blog. Go check it out now!