My how time flies. As of April 11th, 2024, I’ve been blogging for five years. To celebrate, I thought I’d engage in some obligatory navel gazing.

Why blog?

I started this blog on a whim. In the spring of 2019, I was one year post PhD and busy publishing pieces of my dissertation. It was about as much fun as licking sandpaper.

The problem, I now realize, is that I hate academic writing. Although academic prose may be the orthodox dialect of science, it’s also the surest way to kill the intrigue of scientific inquiry. Science is full of wrong turns, heated debates, huge breakthroughs, and foolish mistakes. In short, science is like a courtroom drama. But the academic presentation of the drama is the equivalent of legalese … dry and unreadable.

What’s odd, though, is that in 2019, I didn’t know that I hated academic writing. Instead, I thought I disliked writing itself. You see, for seven years of grad school, I’d leapt into new research, delighted by the tendrils of data that led to unexpected places. But when it came time to write up the results, I felt mostly dread.

In hindsight, the problem was that I hated writing like an academic. Grad-school training had me convinced that writing should be self important, needlessly complicated, and utterly humourless. So when I started blogging, I had an immediate sense of relief. Instead of writing tortured prose, I could write honestly about what I thought. It was hugely gratifying.

To be sure, I still find writing difficult. Often, I struggle for hours (sometimes days) to express an idea clearly. But while this churn is frustrating, the reward of clear communication is worth it. When the idea is finally on paper, crystallized in a form that (I hope) the average person can understand, I feel like I’ve crafted something worth sharing.

Alternatively, if I’ve done something scientifically foolish (which I’m sure I have), I’m proud to do it boldly and clearly.

The joy of writing research notes

Besides enjoying the tone of blog prose, I like that blogging is a way to resurrect the ‘research note’.

A century ago, scientific papers were concise affairs. A scientist would discover something interesting. Then they would write a short research note that said ‘here is something interesting’. The published note would have minimal references, and a only a cursory nod to other literature. In short, the paper was the equivalent of a modern blog post.

Over time, though, the requirements for a formal scientific paper grew more onerous, especially the need to conduct a literature review. The result, as Figure 1 shows, was the persistent rise of the phrase ‘literature review’ in written English.

To be sure, reviewing what other people have said about a topic is good scholarship. And there is certainly a place for well-crafted reviews of past thinking. (In a dissertation, for example.) That said, requiring every scientific paper to have an exhaustive ‘literature review’ is frustratingly redundant.

What’s also redundant is the need to funnel science through academic publishers. These organizations are essentially vampires that suck 30% profit margins out of publicly funded research. We don’t need these monsters. Science is a public good, and it can be conveyed swiftly and easily through the public internet.

In short, blogging is an easy way for scientists to document their work without the burden of formal publishing. So if you’re a young scientist (or even an old one), I’d encourage you to think of blogging as the best way to convey your research.

Blogging as note taking

Now to some obligatory life lessons.

During my masters degree, I once had a committee member bombard me with criticism of my thesis. After several minutes of onslaught, he noticed that I wasn’t taking notes. The meeting did not end well.

Now the truth was that I thought the committee member’s points were fairly silly, and hence, not worth writing down. But the flip side is that I’ve always been bad at taking notes. I had no system then, and I have no system now. I just read stuff and remember whatever my brain happens to remember.

That said, I now realize that blogging is how I take notes. It was Cory Doctorow who tipped me off to how this works. (It’s what he calls the memex method.) The idea is that no matter how great your system, note taking on your own computer tends to devolve into entropic decay. You take notes. Then you forget about them. Repeat.

In a sense, the problem is that when you write notes solely for yourself, there’s no pressure to be coherent. Unfortunately, my experience is that it’s the pressure to be coherent that makes notes memorable. Because blogging is public, it forces a moment of reflection before you write something down. It’s this reflection — driven by the implicit threat of public scrutiny — that staves off the entropic decay of personal note taking. Or at least, it does for me.

The other nice feature of blog-based note taking is that it makes your ideas easily searchable. All modern website builders come with full-text search that is generally better than what you get on your computer. Add the fact that your public blog will be crawled by search engines, and you have a built-in recipe for indexing your ideas for future reference.

Don’t write SEO spam

Now to some obligatory advice about blogging. First up, don’t write SEO spam.

Some backstory. When I started blogging in 2019, I quickly learned that business bloggers were obsessed with ‘SEO’ — search engine optimization. The idea was that you should write content that catered to certain key words — words that would get you ranked highly on search engine results. I thought SEO targeting was stupid then, and I continue to think it’s stupid now.

The difference is that today, we know that SEO bullshit is ruining the internet. SEO is a way to game search engines — a way to place vacuous, ad-driven clickbait at the top of search results. The consequence is that if you search for something on the modern web, you have to sift through a mountain of useless spam. Unfortunately, the popularity of large language models has only made things worse, vastly increasing the ability of internet enshittifiers to churn out SEO swill.

If you’re starting a blog today, take no part in this enshittification industry. Write for humans, not search engines.¹

Search-engine traffic is over-rated

Speaking of search engines, there’s a common assumption that search-engine traffic is the route to internet success. But for the most part, it’s not.

Think of search engines like the tourist industry. Some websites are the equivalent of Hawaii — a place that depends on tourist traffic for its survival. Such sites are almost always selling something, and their content caters to the lowest common denominator. But other corners of the internet are like a great local restaurant — places that thrive mostly by word of mouth.

A science blog (like this one) will invariable land in the second category. Sure, some people will stumble upon it by chance. But most of these tourists will eat one meal and never come back. The real audience for your science blog are the readers who become ‘locals’ — the ones who read your stuff regularly.

Now the truth is that building a community of ‘locals’ is a tough slog. There’s no shortcut other than to keep at it. Sure, the odd post may go viral. But my experience is that this short-term traffic has almost no relation to long-term readership.

For example, when captain Elon Musk tweeted a link to my post on the Dunning-Kruger effect, it created a boom of tourist traffic. But almost all of the visitors ate a single meal and never returned. (That’s probably a good thing. If a Musk-bro liked my research, it would suggest that I’m doing something wrong.)

To summarize, while you’re ignoring SEO, forget about targeting search engines as well. Write for the group of engaged readers who like what you do.

Blogging is dead. Long live blogs

Now to some obligatory reflection.

The funny thing about ‘blogging’ is that the term itself has long been an anachronism. Named after a contraction of the phrase ‘web log’, the ‘blog’ arose in the late 1990s as a kind of online diary, devoted to the minutia of everyday life. But by the mid 2010s, this way of blogging had been mostly killed off by social media. What survived were ‘blogs’ that focused on issues of public importance. Science communication flourished, as did web writing about all kinds of niche topics.

By the 2020s, people continued to declare that ‘blogs’ were dead. Meanwhile social media had so thoroughly killed off traditional journalism that reporters were fleeing to the blogosphere in droves.² Of course, these journalists rebranded their blogs as ‘newsletters’. But potato, potahto. Call it whatever you want … my point is that self-published, internet-hosted writing is alive and well.

Thoughts on the future

Now to some obligatory speculation about the future of this blog. What’s in store? The short answer is more of the same. I’m going to continue to do research that interests me, and I’ll continue to write about it on the internet.

That said, lately I’ve been thinking about the massive rise in audio and video content on the web. Part of me dislikes this content, as it’s prone to gimmickry and meaningless pyrotechnics. But another part of me realizes that it fills a huge void. The truth is that often, it’s easier to get knowledge from a talking person than from a word-laden page. For example, I’m an avid consumer of YouTube talks about astrophysics. Usually, the talks are accessible in a way that scientific papers are not.

Turning to my own work, I try hard to make my research accessible. But my guess is that by virtue of it being written only, I’m excluding a (potentially large) group of people who’d prefer to have audio-visual versions of my posts. The problem is that pontificating on video is not my thing. I think slowly. So if I appear eloquent in print, it’s because I’ve agonized over my choice of language. Give me an open mic, and I’ll mostly sound like an idiot.

That said, I’ve noticed a trend in which bloggers record themselves reading their own posts. This approach does interest me. Still, my posts are typically data heavy, and charts don’t translate well into audio. So what to do?

Looking to the future, I’m toying with making audio versions of my posts that come with embedded slides. (So basically, a YouTube slideshow.) This approach appeals to me because I could make some whizzbang code that automates the slideshow from the figures that are already in my posts. Then I’d just have to record myself reading the text that I’ve already written.

Anyway, in the near future, you may find audio/video versions of my work that accompany the normal text version. Perhaps you will find it useful.

Thanks for reading

This ends my anniversary trip gazing at my own navel. Regular programming will resume soon, with an upcoming post about the Jevons paradox.

To everyone who reads this blog, thank-you for joining me on this scientific journey. If you have the means, the best way to support my work is by becoming a patron. And the second best way is to recommend the blog menu to passing tourists. Some of these folks may become regulars!

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Notes