1:48 AM
Re: What is SE's "Broader perspective?" Well, it is a well-known fact that "trying to do it all" is a surefire way to kill a company. SE wants to ensure that they aren't trying to be everything, to everyone, by being a Q&A platform, chatroom, career services, and blog provider. Allowing sites to have blogs may be spreading themselves too thin, and requiring resources that are needed elsewhere.
12 hours later…
1:54 PM
@vzn I'm not making much extra overhead to the process - in fact, I'm operating off of the deadline that the community decided on its own. I was already going to be a review step to begin with (being the one responsible for actually setting up the blog within our network), so this was mostly a formality to explain that not only am I adhering to your deadline, but also giving some background on what things I want to see rather than leaving the criteria completely nebulous.
To address the matter of why we're halting blog setup as a general policy. It's similar to the same reason that we shut down private beta sites and even public beta sites when they become ghost towns. Is there valuable content present in them? Usually some. But ours is a platform that promises an engaging community, one that responds. We're meant to be the end of the situation wherein someone finds the question they need solved, to discover that it was posted four years prior with no response.
Blogs are not equivalent, certainly, but the spirit remains the same. We currently have 22 blogs over on Blog Overflow. 8 of them posted something this year, 7 more posted in 2013, and the rest last posted in 2012 or earlier. When people think about SE blogs currently, they don't think about those ones that update. If they even know that blogs are a thing at all, they all remember more of the ones that don't produce anything. The ones trying to be active are essentially drowned out.
2
As the problem lies a lot with the "integration" (or more relevantly, the extreme lack thereof) between the blogs and the community, we're looking at ways we can improve the situation. We want to fix this, ultimately, and things like reputation or privileges or basically anything to get them truly linked, we're looking at these things. And when that's all setup, we'll be opening the general doors for blogs for the network.
However, this is a big undertaking. There's work involved to create these systems. There's work involved setting up all of these blogs in the current state, and the amount of work we'll need to perform in order to convert everything to a new system will magnify with each additional blog we create past what we already have.
1 hour later…
3:10 PM
hi grace appreciate the interest by se in the blogs. think the overall idea is sound/promising but as usual "devil is in the details".
everything about se is free/voluntary so if anyone doesnt like blogs that arent updated frequently, they are free to contribute to them...
understand the issue of "ghost towns" & have noticed that occasionally eg theoretical physics shutdown etc.
understand the se platform has a lot of code behind it & its not easy to change around its mechanisms...
anyway still think that you seem to be asking a lot of math.se, to see if this community can figure out a way to overcome inertia that has occurred in other groups...
inertia in se blogs cross-site seems to suggest that maybe people overestimate the payoffs/rewards/exposure/fun/interest/collaboration or whatever & then reality slowly sets in....
clearly it seems if there is any rep incentive it seems very likely that could rapidly turnaround the situation...
3:56 PM
@vzn I'm not asking for this as a reason to get a blog. I'm asking you folks to consider that as a means to actually, y'know, keep the thing running.
It's entirely to the community's benefit to exert the extra effort to make the system work. So in that vein, I don't find that asking the community to take that extra effort is asking too much, because I feel like if the community wants to make the blog a thing that happens, they should want to do everything in their power to do so.
I'm not intending to mandate a specific kind of schedule or hierarchy - it's up to the community to figure out what actually works for keeping the community motivated and production to be maintained. What I wanted to do was bring up what is a consistent problem, to get it in the minds of the community so that they will actually look at overcoming that obstacle rather than letting the entire effort crash and burn.
2 hours later…
5:34 PM
ok a hypothetical question, what is the min number of posts that a site could put out a year that you would be comfortable with?
you seem to be very concerned with post freq. not sure if that is your own concern or se mgt in general concern.
possible solution... an interesting idea would be to keep a backlog of posts that dont all get posted as soon as they are available.
hey, heres another interesting idea (hope this is not self sabotaging...!), ppl could vote on which posts get higher priority in the queue.
6:29 PM
@vzn What defines comfortable, I guess? I'm not trying to set guidelines here explicitly because I don't want to create some sort of "goalpost" that people will just achieve. It's not important to me how often that you post (though from a personal my own perspective, I'd love to see at least 1-2 posts a month, so that's about 18 posts a year), it's just that I want to see that posting activity continues year after year on a regular enough basis.
The SciFi blog isn't exactly "consistent" but they do try hard to get one or two a month. They had 13 articles in 2013 and 4 articles so far this year, of varying amounts of depth.
I noted @ThomasKlimpel's concern about setting bars with giant, in-depth posts, and I should note that especially in a situation with multiple authors talking about multiple things, one shouldn't feel obligated to try and maintain this huge "Everything must be a giant essay" kind of deal. Sometimes you have something that comes out as a handful of paragraphs and that's all it is, but if it's interesting to the community and it's a good read, that's of more value than trying to stretch it
Dry spells do happen, too - sometimes you could go for a month or two without anything to write about because people don't have topics to write about. The SciFi blog, for example, has a hole from October 2012 to April 2013. But they made up for that, and got themselves back on track. That's why I keep speaking of trying to keep things alive. After a period of downtime, you want people to be able to get back into the blog, not forget it's a thing.
@SanathDevalapurkar Because you are young, there is the danger that you will try to pack too much information into a single blog post. Why talk about ZFC and topos theory in the same post? Do you want to talk about topos theory without first introducing category theory? Do you want to talk about ZFC without first introducing first order logic? Did you ever get an "accepted for publication after major revision" editor decision, with less than a month time for resubmission? Why not try to aim for "less", and turning it into "more" by putting the saved effort into a beautiful presentation? — Thomas Klimpel May 4 at 22:29
yesterday, by Thomas Klimpel
I hope the initial extensively prepared blog posts won't set a too high standard regarding blog post length and depth of content. The beauty of many math blogs is that they contain both short pieces of less than a page, as well as extremely long pieces of more than 10 pages.
re "dry spells" there really is always tons of stuff to write about, its surely more a shortage of motivation/volunteers etc
dont think dormant blogs reflect negatively on se in general but some seem to be taking that attitude.
> According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.
to me this article was revealing but also a bit misconceived or narrow/ onesided/ shortsighted. non-updated blogs can still get many hits, sometimes their hits even increase over time.
ofc fresh blogs are one of the aspects that drive them, but its "taking it too far" to regard their entire value only in their timely content.
eg consider high- current- hit-rate blog posts. no one would take them down just because they're old right?
avg hits/day (over time) or hits/week or hits/month. its rarely reported by blog stats programs. yet seems quite meaningful.
7:49 PM
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Transcript for
May11
May '1412
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Blog Launch
A room for discussing the launch of the math.SE blog - its nam...
