Friday, April 21, 2017

A decade of blogging

A decade ago today I posted Mass-market scholarly communication to start this blog. Now, 459 posts later I would like to thank everyone who has read and especially those who have commented on it.

Blogging is useful to me for several reasons:
  • It forces me to think through issues.
  • It prevents me forgetting what I thought when I thought through an issue.
  • Its a much more effective way to communicate with others in the same field than publishing papers.
  • Since I'm not climbing the academic ladder there's not much incentive for me to publish papers anyway, although I have published quite a few since I started LOCKSS.
  • I've given quite a few talks too. Since I started posting the text of a talk with links to the sources it has become clear that it is much more useful to readers than posting the slides.
  • I use the comments as a handy way to record relevant links, and why I thought they were relevant.
There weren't  a lot of posts until in 2011 I started to target one post a week. I thought it would be hard to come up with enough topics, but pretty soon afterwards half-completed or note-form drafts started accumulating. My posting rate has accelerated smoothly since, and most weeks now get two posts. Despite this, I have more drafts lying around than ever.
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6 comments:

  1. AnonymousApril 21, 2017 at 10:16 AM

    Thanks for sharing your wealth of experience and ideas with the community! The clarity of thought, publishing persistance (and tempo) and usefulness of ideas are an example to follow for all of us. Here's to another 10? 🥂

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  2. Michael L. NelsonApril 21, 2017 at 1:32 PM

    On behalf of me and my research group, we thank you for your commitment to this blog-- it's required reading for everyone in the group. We have two faculty and an army of students and we can't match your productivity ;-)

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  3. Nick KrabbenhoeftMay 2, 2017 at 7:43 AM

    If it was possible to offer a pre-release draft access subscription, I'm sure I wouldn't be the only one lining up to read those half-completed posts.

    ReplyDelete
  4. AnonymousMay 3, 2017 at 4:13 PM

    Like the other commenters I am grateful for your blog, I have been reading it for a a long time. I am particularly impressed by your sensible wisdom about storage technology.

    ReplyDelete
  5. David.June 7, 2017 at 10:38 AM

    I just noticed that this blog has just gone over one million page views in its history.

    ReplyDelete
  6. David.June 11, 2023 at 9:42 AM

    I want to commend Julia Evans' Some blogging myths and its conclusion:

    "I write because it’s fun for me and it helps me organize my thoughts."

    ReplyDelete