@darius blogs are friends

@darius remember the days when people would start their blog with a post about how they were starting blogging... and then they never blogged?

Kids these days are missing out.

@darius Of course, the right move is to then write a blogpost about your preprint. https://quantixed.org/2019/02/22/all-that-noise-the-vesicle-packing-problem/

@darius there’s something really great about a nice, useful/interesting long-form blog post on someone’s personal site.

@darius I wonder if they're posting on arxiv because it tracks references from other papers and they need to pump up their influence numbers for tenure or advancement. Do academics get rewarded for page views these days? 🤷

@darius Same, and same.

@darius I’m still blogging. Dropping a blog post about our latest project… as soon as it’s done

@darius I get your point, but there are a lot of links around the Internet to blogs that are long gone. Plus, blogs are only barely searchable because of Google, and Google is getting shittier by the day and general web-search results are only getting more polluted with SEO trash.

If formatting something in LaTeX and generating a PDF and uploading it to Arxiv gets it a DOI and makes it available to someone who is searching a legitimate database in 10 or 15 years' time... maybe that's what more people should be doing.

It'd be nice if there were some Arxiv-like solution for people without a connection to academia, though that obviously reopens the spam problem if there's not some barrier to entry and a strong reputational system.

@darius I like preprints and blog posts and the boundaries are blurry. And I started https://rogue-scholar.org to make it easier to find science blog posts, archive them, and give them a DOI. Making the boundaries even blurrier.