Sitting in the Kavli lounge, chatting with a friend of mine, I mentioned that I had finally gotten around to setting up a professional blog. He responded with, “What’s a professional blog?” Hmm. When I set the darn thing up, I didn’t really think about what it meant. Well, that’s not totally true – I had one definition:
A professional blog is one you’re not embarrassed to link to your professional homepage
Don’t get me wrong. There’s plenty to be proud of in this personal blog, I think. Anyway, I doubt that my colleagues are all that interested in my opinions on political candidates or evolution.
But they might be interested in what papers I might suggest for reading, about what conferences are in progress, or about some popular news article about a topic of professional interest to them. They might even be interested in my thoughts on those issues. They might be interested in my notes from a conference, as I did last year for my trips to Moscow and Sweden.
I realized that while I blush at the idea of linking my personal blog to my professional page, there are certainly topics I write about which might be helpful to collect in some better place. A professional blog is also a chance to try to take my writing up a notch, put a little more thought and polish into the work. Or not, We’ll see.
So, all of this said, I am proud to announce the creation of a professional blog, called “Going Up Alleys”. You can find it from my professional homepage, either at SLAC (http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~sekula/) or OSU (http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~sekula). The blog itself is hosted on my own webserver, since I am not interested in strong-arming SLAC or OSU to allow me to install WordPress or MySQL, and you can always direct link to it here:
http://steve.cooleysekula.net/goingupalleys/
Remember, this blog will be migrating to WordPress in the next week, so get ready for a new look and a new RSS feed.
