Seb Paquet resumed blogging. Why should you go subscribe to his new blog?

• At some point, he was one of the most read bloggers in the world.
• He is one of the first Computer Scientists to write a Ph.D. thesis on the Social Web.
• His Internet Topic Exchange was a precursor to modern folksonomies.

Suzanne Bowness asked me to answer some questions for a paper she is preparing. I reproduce here the content of the interview. It is mildly incoherent.

When did you first start your web site? Has your purpose for it evolved over the time that it has been online? How did you decide what sections to include?

I started my web site as a graduate student, circa 1995. Initially, my goal was to keep track of my favourite web sites, and share them with the world. Later, I began to post my academic papers online systematically. Informally, I also added a news section to my web site.

Around 2004, academic blogging emerge as a new trend. Researchers like Stephen Downes showed that blogging could be an integral part of one’s research activities. Therefore, I replaced my hand-crafted news section by a bona fide blog. Later on, I added a French blog for my students.

Do you have a sense of what parts of your web site are most commonly consulted? What would you recommend that other professors include on a web site? Anything you would avoid?

My blog is read by over 1000 people. Judging by the comments alone, well known professors and researchers read my blog. Of course, many of them have blogs as well including Peter Turney (NRC)  or David Eppstein (UCI).

In fact, my blog is more than a  publication venue: it is an integral part of my networking activities as a researcher.

Most professors should not become bloggers. However, they should all be making sure that their papers, their data, their software, their courses and their talks are available online. There is mounting evidence that making your work easier to browse and download is beneficial to one’s academic career.

How does your web site help you in reaching out to students? How does it help to raise your public profile?

I believe that most of my students do not read my blog. Other students do, certainly. I have not yet found a good way to integrate blogging with teaching. Indeed, whereas most teaching in universities happens in closed groups, blogging appears to require large open social networks to be effective.

I find however that many graduate students enjoy the fact that I make my papers and my software available online freely.

Did you design your site yourself? What software do you use to maintain it? Any advice for other profs in terms of technical upkeep or updating frequency?

Like many science professors, I have initially designed my Web site using a text editor and raw HTML. I maintain my own blog engine (wordpress).

Universities often do not have the resources to help professors maintain effective Web sites. Fortunately, many inexpensive solutions are available (wordpress.com, blogger.com, and so on). In fact, most academic bloggers do not blog from within the university networks. People have even coined a term for this do-it-yourself strategy: edupunk.

I spend  many hours every week publishing content online. Some may consider it wasteful. However, I believe university professors are in the communication business.

Any other comments/advice on creating a web presence?

In 2008, the Web is a social phenomenon. Merely posting content is no longer enough. You have to find a way to interact dynamically with people interested by your work and ideas.

Two years ago, I asked whether academic blogging was still relevant. At the time, two famous bloggers had stopped (Sébastien Paquet and Stephen Downes). Evidently, I kept on blogging. I even took up microblogging.

Let me revisit some of the benefits.

• Bloggers are more visible. This blog has over 900 readers. Some are students, others are engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, researchers or professors.
• Blogging is good for knowledge management: leaving a trace of your thoughts is always a good idea. You are also forced to flush out your ideas and you get immediate feedback.

However, reading Daniel Tunkelang today, I realized that the most important benefit is the networking effect. A blog without a social network is nothing. Nobody wants to read a list of random thoughts. What makes blogging rewarding for me are the comments and the link I receive. But I enjoy even more reading others and commenting elsewhere.

In effect, good blogging makes you part of a rich and open community. That is very valuable.

From the lowly Ph.D. student at a small school, to the Havard professor, researchers are blogging. Here are some of the reasons why they blog:

• Research is a social activity. Blogging allows us to keep and create links with diverse researchers whose varied interests keeps our mind open and fresh.
• Blogging is a personal activity, whereas most of science is consensual. Hence, blogging helps to promote ideas that would not survive otherwise. It is easier to go against the grain in a blog then in a research journal.

My thesis is that blogging will ultimately be recognized as an activity encouraging true innovation.

References:

• Julia Davies, Guy Merchant, Looking from the Inside Out: Academic Blogging as a New Literacy, 2006.
• Gerard Goggin, Public intellectuals in the Internet age, 2007.

Blogging is dangerous for non-tenured faculty: Blogging will not get you tenure. Neither will giving talks worldwide. Tenure is usually granted because you were able to hold a decent research program, and you showed respect for the students. However, if blogging prevents you from getting tenure, something is very wrong with your blogging or your school. I have heard stories of famous bloggers who did not get tenure. But I have not been convinced that they were denied tenure because of their blogging. For my tenure case, blogging was a one-liner in my activity report. I doubt my colleagues paid any attention to it. Certainly, none of them had read my blog. But even if they had read my blog, I doubt if they would have found it very surprising. My blogging activities just reflect who I am.

Serious researchers have no time for blogging: Indeed, there is always another paper to write and more time to spend at the library, isn’t there? Let me quote Downes on this: If you are spending time in meetings, spending time traveling or commuting to work, spending time reading books and magazines, spending time telephoning people (or worse, on hold, or playing phone tag) then you are wasting time that you could be spending connecting to people online.

Blogging distracts you away from the research: bloggers do not tend to write about their latest research results. We tend to write about ideas that will not make it into our research papers. Is it a distraction? It might be, but does blogging cause you to lose focus in your research? I doubt it. If your research is out-of-focus and going nowhere, blogging may not help you, but you should not blame blogging either. However, your blog will help you write and communicate better. While a blog will not directly promote your research, the increased visibility it generates cannot hurt you.

Disclaimer: I do not claim that maintaining a blog helps your academic career.

Source: David Crotty and Stephen Downes

Update: David Eppstein points out that if you get comments telling you that you are coming across in an unflattering light, it might be worthwhile paying attention to them.

(source)

Facebook has been the hot networking site for quite some time now. Founded in 2004 by a teenager, this same teenager, Mark Zuckerberg, is now 23, has no degree, and is about 2300 times richer than I will ever be. (No, I am not bitter.)

Some colleagues asked me to join facebook today. My friends from MyDYO Inc. are there too. So I joined. Here are my impressions.

• The ads feel out-of-place. As a disclaimer, my blog is not any prettier, but I do not have millions and millions to spend on graphical design.
• It is far more popular than I expected. It seems that about 50% of everyone I know is on facebook. Including many people who do not have a web presence.
• Oddly, people seem to assume that the data put there is private.
• It is a walled garden. As far as I can tell, there is no way to share content through URIs without having visitors log into facebook. Not very RESTful. However, the application is very responsive.
• The search engine appears very limited. Running Google through this data would be much more fun!
• The first few minutes are fun. Finding out that you are more connected than you thought is always pleasing. However, I cannot see why I would spend much time in a walled garden where most of the content seems to be your list of friends you have no seen in years? There is a reason why I have forgotten all these names… I am busy.
• There is clearly a viral effect at work, but I do not understand why it would work better than with other networking sites I tried.
• I quickly browsed the applications. According to Seb, this is where the real value lies. And indeed, I was impressed. Thinking a bit more about it, I think that facebook serves as a form of OpenID: you sign on to facebook once and you can automagically use a large number of applications without having to create several accounts and reenter the same data, again and again. I see no reason why we can’t have an open-world non-proprietary facebook, other than the fact that we have not yet managed to get OpenID off the ground.

See also my post Academic blogging: why still bother?