IlliGAL Blogging

Like many Americans, I became hooked on the blogosphere during the 2004 Presidential election cycle. In my own case, my daily fix consisted of reading HughHewitt, Instapundit, Polipundit, Captainsquartersblog, and Powerlineblog. I almost OD'd on news/commentary aggregators and electoral vote trackers such as realclearpolitics and electoral-vote. As I read through many of the commentary blogs, I came to realize that many of the pajamahadeen were lawyers, and many of those taught in law schools.

The blogs during the election were an impressive display. Lone critics connected from their laptops to other citizens through the magic of the modern web, holding candidates, the mainstream media (MSM), and each other accountable for inaccuracy, spin, and flat-out lies. It also looked like great fun: freelance writers and researchers, writing and researching, largely for fun, not profit, motivated by the leverage of influencing their countrymen. During the election, I told my wife that "I can do that," but to take on a blog requires discipline, and I wasn't sure what to blog about.

I resisted the temptation for as long as I could, and as I sat thinking during Christmas break about upgrading my laboratory's website (IlliGAL) I came to know exactly what I had to do. I needed to get my lab blogging on genetic algorithms, and we needed to make the blog the centerpiece of the site. To this point, we've only been able to get up on Blogger, but eventually we plan to host our own blog using Wordpress, and after we are hosting our own blog, we will integrate the blog into the home page as part of major overhaul of the website.

In so doing, we believe we will continue to get the 500 or so visitors who come to IlliGAL looking for tech reports and code each day, but we also hope to inform, teach, interact, and link with the community of genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation as well as newcomers who want know more about GAs, how they work, and how they can be used.

My short sojourn through the blogosphere has been a blast, first as a reader and now as a contributor. The immediacy of publishing at a push a button, beats the heck out of the academic publication cycle with its tedious submission, review, revision, and more review. The informality and the freedom of being able to take a subject where you want to because you want to is liberating in a way that is hard to describe. So what are you waiting for? If you've said, "I can do that," you're right, you can. Why not hop on the web, take five minutes, signup for a Blogger account, and start blogging? You'll find out what the lawyerbloggers and all the rest found out some time ago, and even if you don't reach thousands, you'll get what you're thinking into the written word, and maybe, just maybe, an interested person will read it. And when you get that first post up and running, why not drop us line and give us (www.illigal.blogspot.com) a link?