But I do not see the point of your response.
]]>@Others: I note that the title was something like an idea of a mathoverblog, a collective mathematics blogging idea, similiar to mathoverflow for asking questions.
]]>If you're adventurous and poor, you can try running cnprog, an open source version of SE. As far as I know, the only sites running on cnprog are cnprog.com and 9fingers.pl. See this meta.SE question about cnprog for various thoughts people have about it.
]]>In particular, blogs are intended for discussions and it's important to "own" your posts and comments. SE is a load of rubbish for discussions and anyone with high enough rep can edit your posts and answers.
]]>Here is my recipe for internet success: (1) Think of a group of people who (a) spend a lot of time in front of computers and (b) procrastinate. Like graduate students, programmers, authors, or, well, mathematicians. (2) Provide regular amusing content for those people. (3) Page views!
As always, the second step is the hard one! But there is no reason to think that it is harder now than it was when we founded the Secret Blogging Seminar.
I don't believe the internet currently produces nearly as much mathematical amusement as the procrastinating mathematicians of the world can consume. Remember that most mathematicians are specialists: I'm unlikely to spend time reading a technical post about analysis, algebraic topology or set theory. And I suspect that I am broader than most. Suppose, for example, that you are a representation theorist. I don't think that the internet produces more than half an hour per day of representation theoretic procrastination. Same for complex analysis, same for algebraic statistics, same for almost any field I think of. Start a blog in any of those fields, and post entertaining, well researched content once or twice a week, and you'll be a success.
]]>best known math blogs
Implying that there are yet unknown, yet secreter, yet bester math blogs out there... ;-)
]]>Stupid as this may sound, SBS wasn't SBS when we started it. As a bunch of nobodies, we somehow ended up with one as the world's best known math blogs. I have no idea how to replicate that, but the SBS story should give hope to random people who want to start blogs.
]]>The blog of Charles Siegel was useful and is mostly inactive now. Since Charles is here, he can probably enlighten us why ..
Drop in activity at SBS is expected, since they are so involved with this site.
Others like Lieven le bruyn, Emmanuel Kowalski, Terry Tao etc. keep blogging as usual. Nothing has happened to stop them.
I myself benefitted a lot more from my one month in MO, compared to what I usually got per month by reading all the blogs. I even had much less enthusiasm to visit the blogs one by one. However a use of google reader/netvibes made the task easy and I am alerted whenever there is a new post in the blogs ..
All in all, MO is much cooler. It is so cool, that I do not have words to describe it! I totally stopped hanging out at facebook, after discovering MO. Btw, there seems to be facebook group for MO... If enough people join it, perhaps I can too.
]]>Such a blog would naturally have most interesting and commented-on posts on top. It would also have an immediate feedback for all the posts via votes, favorites and view count. The tagging capabilities would be also quite advanced compared to typical platforms.
This seems to me to be an interesting idea to experiment with.
]]>(For what it's worth, I have a large pile of unfinished posts, but the reason I haven't finished them has nothing to do with MO.)
]]>A blog is like a noticeboard. However in MO there is more interaction with a broader group of people and shier people can also come in.
A blog is mostly about yourself. MO is collective.
]]>Between my own research and writing, an undergraduate research project I'm supervising, and MO, this is why I haven't been posting much. If someone else who had more time or energy were to start up a high quality, high frequency, math blog, I think it would take off very fast. If you are starting such a blog, once you have a half dozen posts up or so, e-mail me and I'll be glad to promote you on our blog.
I don't see why associating this blog with MO would help with any of these problems.
]]>I have seen a few times that MO questions could work better as blog posts, but clearly not everyone has the time to maintain their own blog and I can see your point in this respect. What I would suggest instead, then, is that people try something like requesting a guest post on a well-known blog, and that bloggers in turn be generous with their guest posts.
]]>Also, MO takes up too much time as it is!
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