To facilitate browsing and not to let the older posts be entirely hidden in the archive, I have added a separate page with a list of all posts of the past 3.5 years. For those of you curious which of those posts have received most traffic over time, I have updated the vox populi page. I also added a list of my most cited research articles; for the time being, the topics covered by both the top posts and most cited papers have an empty intersection. Ok, stretching it a bit, then post 2 and paper numbers 4 and 8 are somewhat related, but that is easy with post 2’s topic on ‘computers science with/for biology’, of which the papers are just two examples (conceptual modeling for biology and ontologies in ecology).
One can only speculate why this is so… It may well be that the population of blog-readers is disjoint from the population who consider my scientific contributions of some value. Or perhaps the highly informal posts about my research do not attract the precious time of the researchers (which does not entail any consequences regarding the translocation of the negation in that statement!); however, perhaps scientists should read more blogs and start one of their own. John Baez has posted an interesting draft article about the usefulness of blogs in research, and (update addition on 15-10-’09:) Gowers and Nielsen describe their take on online collaborative research based on the Polymath project experience in the openly accessible Nature opinion article [1]. Maybe we can dish up examples for research in computer science, or the Semantic Web in particular, to demonstrate there are some benefits to it. Anyone has an example?
References
[1] Timothy Gowers and Michael Nielsen. (2009). Massively collaborative mathematics. Nature 461, 879-881.
Keet blog 