This is where I collect and write things, mostly on academe and artificial intelligence. Established in 2010, by Vaishak Belle.
The other day, a fairly senior colleague asked me what the benefit of blogging is, especially for academics. He was under the impression that it is purely for patting yourself on the back and posting about your accepted papers, which he wasn’t into.
I agree that to a large extent senior people constantly posting about their newly accepted papers can seem a bit disingenuous, especially if they have young researchers in the lab doing the bulk of the work. It can seem intimidating for phd students to look at so many accepted papers from one person whilst struggling to publish their first paper.
However, it is precisely in this sense in which I think Twitter and traditional blogging is different. One will find that only posting about your own work gets tiresome when you need to go beyond a few lines. It then really becomes about dissemination and discussing ideas that inspired rather than talk about the success of a few accepted papers. I can remember a whole range of interesting blogs from “the bad astronomer” to brain pickings that did a great job in talking about science.
So I would say there are two important reasons to blog. First, it allows you to talk about things other than your own work, but also the context that you find yourself in and how academia generally works. And second it allows you to speak about science you find interesting in a much more accessible fashion. academic writing can sometimes be a bit stiff and formal and lacks the easy-going narrative that we find in face2 face conversations. This is exactly where blogging steps in, but on an internet scale.