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http://www.researchblogging.org is an agregator for research blogs (or in particular, an aggregator for blogposts that cite peer-reviewed articles). Many of our posts cite research papers and deal with research topics. Can/should we add the cstheory blog to this aggregator?

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Here are my thoughts. Sorry for the delay, Artem.

For those who don't know, my personal blog, Nanoexplanations, has been registered at ResearchBlogging.org for a few months now.

Short answer: YES, it would be a good idea to submit an application there to add the community blog. This will require adding at least one new category to the blog, and posts in that category will require additional logistics to submit. We gain broader traffic and higher pagerank. (The pagerank thing is nothing to sneeze at, btw. I just googled "Valiant Turing lecture," and my blog entry about the lecture came back higher-ranked than the ACM video of the lecture itself (!?!). My post that day is not aggregated by ResearchBlogging; but the blog itself has been pumped up by being linked to many other science sites.)

Longer answer: Artem's characterization of researchblogging.org is not quite correct. For information about the application process, see this page; the guidelines for a post that can be aggregated by their service are here.

TooLongDidn'tReadTheLinks: For a post to qualify, it must thoughtfully discuss archived, peer-reviewed research. Papers on ECCC or the ArXiv are in a grey area; they may qualify if the discipline's subculture means putting them there is tantamount to publishing. There is a flagging system, and blogs have been removed from the service, for citing publications and then just regurgitating the abstract, etc. (I've seen one blog disappear myself.) The blog post must contain original work. In particular, the technical introduction posts we have published so far do not qualify as far as I am concerned, because there is not enough in-depth discussion of any single reference -- the posts are valuable to the community, but are "stitched-together abstracts" from multiple sources. This is not intended to denigrate the Technical Intros in any way; I like those posts a lot, I am only saying it is not what ResearchBlogging.org is looking for.

Proposal: We should continue posting as we are posting -- Answer of the Week, Technical Introduction, Conference/Workshop Reports, and occasional blog announcements -- and also add an additional category. I am open to suggestions about the name, but as a first thought, I will propose, "Research." Such posts will have at least one, and at most three, citatations, and will discuss the content of the paper(s) in depth, perhaps both strengths and weaknesses, and preferably conclude by pointing to open problems. Think the Lipton blog, or writing a conference review when you are not anonymous.

Logistics: multiple authors can register on a single blog, see here. If this is something the community wants, I will (apply to) register the blog, and others can add as needed.

Known bugs: (1) A password only works once. You need to reset your password every time you want to log in. Also, don't close the window until you are completely done. (2) The blog scanner is very slow, when it works at all. Once a post is uploaded, wait five minutes, then manually go into settings and rescan the blog yourself. These "fixes" were suggested to me by Dave Munger, director of ResearchBlogging.org.

I have found that being registered there was good for my writing and my own blog. It forced me to post less often and to take what I wrote more seriously, because I wanted the post to be aggregated. I have fallen off the wagon recently, because I have been posting to promote the community blog. I plan to swing back soon.

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  • $\begingroup$ note that they sometimes deny adding further authors... I have no idea what their criterion for this is based on. A blog I started recently was accepted to research blogging, and I wanted to add one of my cobloggers as a second account (since he is currently generating the great researchblogging-level posts) but when he applied for an account they simply denied him without contacting me or including any reason in the email. So there might be even further loopholes to jump through. $\endgroup$
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Sep 23, 2011 at 0:43
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EDITED TO ADD: The community blog is now registered there. The blog profile is here.

So does five votes, no responses, mean, "Yes Aaron we agree?"

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  • $\begingroup$ technically, the question should have been phrased as a policy question if it pertained to site policy. Since it doesn't quite (I don't see linking to researchblogging as a decision that negatively impacts the community, and neither (it appears) does anyone else, I'd say go for it. $\endgroup$
    – Suresh Venkat
    Sep 12, 2011 at 4:03
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Partly as an experiment, I added a ResearchBlogging citation to the current post, Arnab's on quantifier elimination (part I). It has been aggregated. For example, you can see it in their Computer Science/Engineering feed. (The post shows my face, unfortunately, because I am using the same email address for both CSTheory's blog and my own blog; I didn't realize that would happen.)

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I don't see a downside at all !

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  • $\begingroup$ the only downside is that for many authors (like our blog) I think each author might have to make an account on that site for it to work properly, but I am not sure. Maybe someone who has used the service can tell us more. $\endgroup$
    – Artem Kaznatcheev Mod
    Sep 6, 2011 at 4:53
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    $\begingroup$ @Artem: I am busy for a few days and will not be thinking about this. None of the posts we have written so far would qualify. It would involve adding a new category of posts. Also, the site has some software bugs. I may not write anything else until the weekend. Not open and shut for me. The #1 thing we could do to increase traffic would be to have a professional looking blog that is pleasant to read, and has regularly refreshing content in the sidebar, and attractive sharing buttons. $\endgroup$
    – Aaron Sterling
    Sep 6, 2011 at 6:07

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