IlliGAL Blogging

Yesterday I posted the following:

Since IlliGAL Blogging opened up shop on 24 January, I've been a little surprised that the young avant garde of the EC world hasn't been blogging its brains out, but maybe I'm missing something.

To which, Amir at thesilog commented:

During my surfing in blogosphere, I have found few really technical weblogs. This rush of academic weblogs (in AI-related fields) is rather new or at least new in the eye of me! Most previous academic weblogs are something between daily life of an graduate student or professor and their research-related news, e.g. mine weblogs is a sample of it.

Yes, this is what I've found, and I think it is rather surprising. Blogging has been around for awhile. I would have thought that dozens of young faculty and hotshot grad students who already were blogging for personal reaons would have turned to academic blogging by now.

Amir continues

And more importantly, it would be nice to discuss about "what a weblog can do for us?". Is it a place to report, or a place to disuss, or place to fast-publishing? What about its formality? Can I claim that I have this XYZ idea if I do not publish a paper in a conference or journal and write a post in my weblog instead?

Others need to answer these questions for themselves, but my lab website has always been a place to disseminate work, inform, and influence. Blogging for IlliGAL Blogging is a way to do those things in a manner that can provide more continually updated content. Also the comment facility allows us to have useful online dialogue in a straightforward manner. Previous efforts at interacting with readers were too static or too annoying.

Moreover, I like the informality of blogging, but I've never been one to be overly formal in academic discourse either. This work is fun. I'm not sure why it is necessary to dress up the joy of discovery in stilted language and thereby turn it into a form of drudgery.

I do share Amir's concern with posting new ideas prior to publication. I don't believe blogging takes the place of scholarly publication, and we are holding new results from this site until they are published. Having said this, it has been a long standing policy at IlliGAL to publish papers as tech reports on the web immediately following paper completion. The public nature of that posting has made it difficult for others to claim our ideas as their own, and perhaps contemporaneous posting of new ideas to a blog could serve the same function. This might especially become the case if bloggers continue their habit of citing one another generously (as is the academic ideal).

If this were to take place, rapid exchange of new ideas in blogs could represent a new kind of open-source brainstorming, but I have difficulty believing this process will become the norm. It is hard to imagine a tenure and promotion committee ever looking favorably upon a series of blogposts as being sufficiently serious. On the other hand, much of what is going on right now on the web was difficult to imagine 15 years ago. What do IlliGAL Blogging readers think?