Two years ago, I asked whether academic blogging was still relevant. At the time, two famous bloggers had stopped (Sébastien Paquet and Stephen Downes). Evidently, I kept on blogging. I even took up microblogging.

Let me revisit some of the benefits.

• Bloggers are more visible. This blog has over 900 readers. Some are students, others are engineers, teachers, entrepreneurs, researchers or professors.
• Blogging is good for knowledge management: leaving a trace of your thoughts is always a good idea. You are also forced to flush out your ideas and you get immediate feedback.

However, reading Daniel Tunkelang today, I realized that the most important benefit is the networking effect. A blog without a social network is nothing. Nobody wants to read a list of random thoughts. What makes blogging rewarding for me are the comments and the link I receive. But I enjoy even more reading others and commenting elsewhere.

In effect, good blogging makes you part of a rich and open community. That is very valuable.

How an individual evaluates his work is a fundamental intrinsic characteristic. If I had to classify researchers, for example, I would look at how they argue for the quality of their research.

Let me ask you, how do you know how well you are doing? Doing well can mean several things:

• What you state is factually correct.
• Many people know or appreciate your work.
• The performance of your tool  or system is competitive with respect to some measure.
• You are getting a lot done.
• You are making a lot of money.
• …

For most tasks we accomplish, no quantitative measure is satisfying. Can you quantify how good is one of my research papers, or this blog post? Even when you can use a quantitative measure, it is sometimes prohibitively expensive to compute it. Correctness is also somewhat relative. Most non-trivial work is not without errors. The best way to avoid errors is to do trivial work. Popularity is also relative: is McDonald’s better than the best restaurant in my neighborhood?

I think you can change the direction your career takes by changing your metrics.

A secondary characteristic is what you believe makes them good. Are you doing poorly because of the working conditions, or because you are an idiot? Most research papers spend little time on failures, but it would be interesting to see how people describe their failures. I find it interesting to hear famous people tell us why they are doing well. Some stess how brilliant they are. Others stress how much they worked. Others thank others for helping them.

It looks like the government is bailing us out. Wow! $400 millions. To put things in perspective, that is about 2000 times less than the recent bank bail-out in the USA. And I feel better about a university bail-out than a bank bail-out. But that’s just me.

Here is a simple recipe I have learned for efficient software design:

Less planning, more prototyping!

Planning is typically a long and expensive process. Some “experts” justify it by claiming that one week of planning saves ten weeks of programming. In practice, this payoff rarely comes. Why? Because as you make progress, the project itself changes and the planning becomes obsolete.

I am not saying you should not manage and plan your projects. However, all planning should be short-term. The only question you must answer is:

What is the most efficient use of my time today?

In short, I advocate you follow a greedy algorithm to manage your time and your projects. Given that your problems are ill-defined and constantly changing, maximizing your short-time efficiency is the only sane thing to do.

Stop investing your time today in the hope that you will be efficiency tomorrow. Be efficient now!

Of course, if you live in some huge slow-moving corporation and work on problems that will remain the same for decades, then please do plan ahead!

Update: What if you are asked to provide engineering-like schedules and deadline? Make them up.

Ellison’s work on the decline of peer review (reported earlier on my blog) is still being discussed:

Ellison has painstakingly documented the decline of articles published in top  economics journals by authors working in the highest-ranked schools.  These authors are continuing to publish, but are seeking other outlets, including unrefereed preprint and working paper servers.

The analysis is simple:

• If you are good and well known, people will read you even if you publish on toilet paper.
• Peer review is becoming less and less fun. Myself, I have had numerous problems with papers stuck in a journal peer review for several years. Conference peer review is often crude.
• Hence, if you are well known, peer review might not be beneficial to you. As you stop publishing in the top venues, the prestige of these venues diminish which leads more people to drop them, and so on. Until one day, nobody thinks that peer review is prestigious

Of course, peer review is not really declining, but rather slowly evolving. It has become far more acceptable to take some of your work and simply post it online. If it is good and useful, people will make use of it, with or without formal peer review. Not unlike open source software.

Source: Michael Nielsen.