I’ve been hunting all over the interweb looking for Professors that have blogs. While it would be a good thing if there were more, (see the science blogging challenge 2008), there are surprising amount of big boffins that already blog. I should say that by big, I mean (full) professor. By boffin I mean a person practicing science including biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, enginering and hell, even computer “science” and the “dismal science” of economics too. By blog I mean, a web-log or a lab-log which is personal, frequently updated (with web feed) and allows comments. Here is my collection of big boffins with blogs, with a little help from friendfeed.com [1]. It is ordered alphabetically by surname and I hope it gives a flavour of some of the bloggers out there on the Web. If you know any more, please let me know.
| Professor | University | Discipline | Blog |
|---|---|---|---|
| Russ Altman | Stanford University | Bioinformatics | Building Confidence |
| Gary Becker | University of Chicago | Economics (Nobel laureate) | Becker Posner blog |
| Tim Berners-Lee | University of Southampton (also some place called MIT too) | Web Science (is it really a Science?) | Tim Bloggers-Lee |
| David Colquhoun | University College London | Pharmacology | DC’s Improbable Science |
| Stephen Curry | Imperial College London | Biophysics and Crystallograpy | Reciprocal Space |
| Brian Derby | University of Manchester | Materials Science | Title to be announced |
| David De Roure | University of Southampton | Computer Science | e-Research @ OpenWetWare |
| Bill Dutton | University of Oxford | Internet Studies | William H. Dutton @ Oxford Internet Institute |
| Sean Eddy | HHMI Janelia Farm Research Campus | Biological sequence analysis | Cryptogenomicon |
| Jonathan Eisen | University of California, Davis | Evolutionary biology | Tree of Life |
| Michael Eisen | University of California, Berkeley | Genomics, gene regulation etc | it is NOT junk: a blog about genomes, DNA, evolution, open science, baseball and other important things |
| Ian Foster | Argonne National Laboratory, Chicago | Grid and Cloud computing | http://ianfoster.typepad.com/blog/ |
| Timothy Gowers | University of Cambridge | Mathematics (Fields medallist) | Gower’s weblog |
| Alon Halevy | University of Google / Washington | Computer Science and Engineering, databases, data mining etc | alonhalevy.blogspot.com |
| Jim Hendler | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute | Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence | Tetherless world |
| Greg Hickok and David Poeppel | UC Irvine and NYU | Neural organization of language | Talking Brains |
| Richard Jones | University of Sheffield, UK | Nanotechnology | Soft Machines |
| Douglas Kell | University of Manchester, UK | Systems Biology, Biochemistry | blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk |
| Andy Lawrence | University of Edinburgh (currrently on sabbatical at Stanford) | Astronomy | The e-Astronomer: The Universe, the Internet, and Academic Life |
| Lawrence Lessig | Stanford Law School | Economics, law, copyright, creative commons etc | http://www.lessig.org/blog/ |
| Steven Levitt | University of Chicago | Economics | Freakonomics at the New York Times |
| Greg Mankiw | Harvard University | Economics | Greg Mankiw’s Blog |
| Laurence Moran | University of Toronto | Biochemistry | Sandwalk: Strolling with a skeptical biochemist |
| Peter Murray-Rust | University of Cambridge | Chemistry and informatics | A Scientist and the Web |
| Roderic Page | University of Glasgow | Taxonomy, Evolutionary Biology etc | iPhylo, iSpecies and bioGUID |
| Massimo Pigliucci | Stonybrook, New York | Biology and Philosophy | Rationally speaking |
| Henry Rzepa | Imperial College London | Computational Chemistry and Cheminformatics | Chemistry with a twist |
| Stephen Quake | Stanford University | Bioengineering | Stephen Quake guest columnist at Olivia Judson’s New York Times blog |
| Pamela Ronald | University of California, Davis | Plant genomics and pathology | Tomorrow’s Table |
| Steven Salzberg | University of Maryland, College Park | Bioinformatics, Genomics etc | Genomics, Evolution, and Pseudoscience |
| Barry Smith | University at Buffalo, New York State | Ontology, Philsophy, OBOlogy | HL7-watch.blogspot.com |
| Terence Tao | University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) | Mathematics (Fields medallist) | What’s new |
| Carl Wieman | University of British Columbia | Physics (Nobel laureate) | Scientific Blogging |
| Semir Zeki | University College London | Neurobiology | Prof Zeki’s musings |
(Some blogs also worth mentioning, not by full Professors, but prominent scientists include Ensembl Web Log (Ewan Birney etc), Nicolas Le Novère, Christoph Steinbeck, John Overington, Jean-Claude Bradley, The Pfam and Rfam team at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and Luis von Ahn)
Professor Blogger, Free University of the Web, The Internet
We already have quite a few Professors blogging, but there is room for plenty more, so I’m hassling all the Professors I know to ask them if they have thought of starting a blog. Now, some people have argued that blogging is the new email, and that in ten years time every Professor will have a blog, just like every Professor has an email address now. I’m not so sure about that but I do agree with climate change blogger Gavin Schmidt, who says “scientists know much more about their field than is ever published in peer-reviewed journals. Blogs can be a good medium with which to disseminate this tacit knowledge” [2].
With all these Professors blogging, and many more to come, does that mean the Web will become a University?
References
- Various (2008). Major scientists with blogs, friendfeed.com
- Gavin Schmidt (2008). To blog or not to blog? Nature Geoscience, 1(4):208. DOI:10.1038/ngeo170
- Various (2008). discussion of this post over at friendfeed
- Peter J. Denning (2005). Is computer science science? Communications of the ACM, 48(4):27-31. DOI:10.1145/1053291.1053309
- Jim Hendler, Nigel Shadbolt, Wendy Hall, Tim Berners-Lee and Danny Weitzner (2008). Web science: an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the web. Communications of the ACM, 51(7):60-69. DOI:10.1145/1364782.1364798
Picture of Jeffrey Bates (top right) © All rights reserved by Julian Cash from his Perl Gurus set. I’ve probably infringed the copyright by reproducing it here, but I can’t resist using such a great picture.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
One more for you: Professor Ross Anderson, University of Cambridge (computer security): http://www.lightbluetouchpaper.org/
Comment by Andrew Walkingshaw — September 12, 2008 @ 4:31 pm |
Impressed to see two Fields Medallist mathematicians up there. I guess the hunt for a blogging Nobel Prize winner goes on, though.
And any other FRSes there apart from David Colquhoun and Tim Gowers?
Comment by draust — September 12, 2008 @ 7:19 pm |
And (appropriately) Tim Berners-Lee appears to have a blog, though rather an inactive one:
http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
Comment by draust — September 12, 2008 @ 7:44 pm |
Semir Zeki: http://profzeki.blogspot.com/
Comment by Mo — September 14, 2008 @ 10:08 pm |
@Andrew Light Blue Touchpaper is an intersting blog, but as far as I can tell, none of the posts there are authored by Ross Anderson.
@DrAust thanks for reminding me of Tim, I’ve added him now
@Mo ditto
Comment by Duncan — September 15, 2008 @ 9:08 am |
Ian Foster (of Grid fame) is another professor with a blog – see http://ianfoster.typepad.com/
– Dave (thinking about it!)
Comment by David De Roure — September 15, 2008 @ 10:01 pm |
Gary Becker is a blogging Nobelist in economics.
Comment by Michael Nielsen — September 16, 2008 @ 12:28 am |
Thanks, Michael, I’ve added Becker now. I think this list is always going to be incomplete and out of date, and I won’t be able to maintain it forever…
Comment by Duncan — September 16, 2008 @ 9:54 am |
In case you still intend to maintian it: Alon Halevy (database VIP) has a blog http://alonhalevy.blogspot.com/, so does Barry Smith http://hl7-watch.blogspot.com/
Comment by marijke keet — December 17, 2008 @ 11:35 am |
Thanks Marijke, I didn’t know about those, have added them now. I wonder if this list will ever get too big to manage?
Comment by Duncan — December 17, 2008 @ 4:11 pm |
if the blogging really is catching on with the professors, then maybe you can make a mini-ontology with disciplines and main topics, affiliations of the prof etc to make it into a semantic search instead of browsable table
Comment by keet — December 19, 2008 @ 11:45 am |
[...] all Duncan’s fault. For years I’ve known he lives in that other dimension, the parallel universe that is the [...]
Pingback by Reasons to be Blogging 1 2 3 | e-Research — January 4, 2009 @ 9:45 am |
Richard Jones (FRS), Sheffield writes an excellent blog on nanoscience and nanotechnology - Soft Machines .
Best wishes,
Philip
Comment by Philip Moriarty — February 20, 2009 @ 5:31 pm |
Thanks Philip, I’ve added Richard to the list…
Comment by Duncan — February 20, 2009 @ 5:43 pm |
This one by David Poeppl and Greg hickok is very cool
http://talkingbrains.blogspot.com/
Comment by Fabiana Kubke — June 16, 2009 @ 10:26 am |
You have managed to overlook the two most known economists with blogs:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/ (Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize 2008; one of Time magazine’s top 25 blogs, together with Freakonomics).
http://www.bepress.com/ev/ (The Economist’s Voice, edited by Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize 2001).
Other interesting economists’ blogs:
Brad de Long: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/
Mark Thoma: http://economistsview.typepad.com/ (which also includes a very comprehensive list of economists blogs on the right side column).
Comment by Luis — August 6, 2009 @ 9:38 am |