Saturday Self Promotion
Over at Cosmic Variance, Sean Carroll bemoans the lack of science-professor bloggers:
There are a lot of good science bloggers out there, but overall we are way behind other areas of academia in the realm of scholarly blogging. Social scientists and law professors, in particular --? that is, disciplines that regularly interact strongly with the larger social context --? seem to have taken to blogging more readily, including at least one Nobel laureate (economist Gary Becker).
Of course, it's not terribly surprising to discover that science faculty are way behind the blogging curve. Many science departments still haven't really caught on to the idea of the Web, period, let alone this newfangled "blog" thing.
Back when I was job-hunting in 2000-1, it was really depressing to see how many physics departments had webpages that had last been updated in 1998 or so. The situation really hasn't improved in the intervening five years. Research labs are no better-- my old group at NIST is still using the page I helped put together in 1998.
This isn't terribly surprising-- web-page development and public outreach aren't particularly rewarded by the scientific establishment, so those things get done only when somebody with an interest in them takes charge. As a general rule, research group web pages look pretty nice when there's a grad student with some HTML skills in the group looking for a job, and updates cease as soon as that person finds employment.
While it isn't surprising, it is a little ironic, as many physicists are fond of pointing out that physicists invented the Web in the first place. It's also disappointing, as the Web is now the primary information source for a lot of prospective students and job candidates. You're shooting yourself in the foot by not having a reasonably nice, reasonably up-to-date web page.
This is, of course, just a clumsy segue to posting a link to my evenings-and-weekends project for the past month or so, namely the overhaul of our department web page. This has involved a bunch of cargo-cult JavaScript, some halting steps into new-to-me areas of CSS, and one memorable encounter with the soul-sucking horror that is HTML as created by FrontPage (honestly, it's like something out of a Lovecraft story...).
I'm still tinkering here and there, but I like to think it looks pretty good. We'll see how well I do at keeping it updated, and what happens when webmaster duties rotate to somebody else.
Posted at 8:53 AM | link | follow-ups |