My reporting on Loops '05 was picked up in other places so that might have brought even more reader to my little place. I even got an email from a student in China asking me that he cannot read atdotde anymore (as well as for example Lubos' Reference Frame). Unfortunatly, I had to tell him that this was probably due to the fact that his government decided to block blogger.com from the Chinese part of the net because blogs are way to subversive.
So as a little service for some of my readers who not already now, here is a hint on how to read blogs: Of course you can if you have some minutes of boredom type your friends names into google and surf to their blogs every now and then. That is fine. Maybe at some point, you want to find out, what's new in all those blogs. So you go through your bookmarks (favourites in MS speak) and check I you've seen everything that you find there.
But that is cyber stone age! What you want is a "news aggregator". This is a little program that does this for you periodically and informs you about the new articles it found. You just have to tell it where to look. This comes in form of a URL called the "RSS feed". Often you find little icons in the sidebar of the blogs that link to that URL. In others like this you have to guess. All the blogs on blogger.com it is in the form URL_of_blog/atom.xml so for atdotde it is http://atdotde.blogger.com/atom.xml. You have to tell your news aggregator about this URL. In the simplest form, this is just your web browser. Firefox calls it "live bookmarks": You open the "manage bookmarks" window and select "new life bookmark" from the menu. I use an aggregator called liferea, that even opens a little window once it found anything new, but there are many others.
Coming back to the theme of the beginning, I will for once tell you which blogs I monitor (in no particular order):
Have fun!
Now I should send trackback pings. This is such a pain with blogger.com...
Ah, I nearly forgot: This article and how academic blogs can hurt your job hunting scares me a lot! (I admit, I found it on Cosmic Variance.)
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3 comments:
Thanks for the helpful tips. I was still in cyber-stone age up to my neck. But I'm afraid this trick will exponentially increase the risk of blog-addiction.
Robert,
just wanted to let you know that I am a regular reader. By the way, if you like scuba diving, you should visit The Bahamas.
PS: I wrote about your Loops 05 report here:
http://yolanda3.dynalias.org/tsm/tsm09.html#20051015
About PhysComments, let me to stress that I had no access to the email addresses of the people in hep-th area for recent years, because this list was the first one removed from the daily listings and I was barred from querying the author emails. So the "Referenced Author" mechanism was not possible in this field. Now, after one year, there is no more "Referenced Author" mechanism for any group; after all it can be seen that most people voluntary identyfied themselves.
In exchange, as you remark, non-anonymous the physcomments blog entries are now trackbacked in the ArXiV. The mechanism is voluntary on both sides: the ArXiV reviews the recent trackbacks, and our users must explicitly start a comment with the words "A Comment by..." in order to be pinged towards the ArXiV.
Physics Comments is funded now (from my money) for two years more. I'am keeping with it as a kind of blog for people not having a personal blog. I hope hep-th people will also give a try.
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