At One Month

This is near the one month point, so it seems appropriate to consider meta-issues for the moment.

The number of posts is a bit over 20.
The number of people speaking up in discussions is about 10.
The number of people viewing the site is somewhat more than 100.

I am (naturally) dissatisfied with many things.

1. Many of the potential uses haven’t been realized. This is partly a matter of opportunity (no conferences in the last month), partly a matter of will (no open problems because it’s hard to give them up), and partly a matter of tradition. In academia, there is a strong tradition of trying to get everything perfectly right before presentation. This is somewhat contradictory to the nature of making many posts, and it’s definitely contradictory to the idea of doing “public research”. If that sort of idea is to pay off, it must be significantly more succesful than previous methods. In an effort to continue experimenting, I’m going to use the next week as “open problems week”.
2. Spam is a problem. WordPress allows you to block specific posts by match, but there seems to be some minor bug (or maybe a misuse) in how it matches. This resulted in everything being blocked pending approval, which is highly unnatural for any conversation. I approved all posts by real people, and I think the ‘everything blocked pending approval’ problem has been solved. A site discussing learning ought to have a better system for coping with what is spam and what is not. Today’s problem is to solve the spam problem with learning techniques. (It’s not clear this is research instead of just engineering, but it is clear that it would be very valuable here and in many other places.)
3. Information organization is a problem. This comes up in many ways. Threading would be helpful in comments because it would help localize discussion to particular contexts. Tagging of posts with categories seems inadequate because it’s hard to anticipate all the ways something might be thought about. Accessing old posts via “archives” is cumbersome. Idealy, the sequence of posts would create a well-organized virtual site. In many cases there are very good comments and it seems altering the post to summarize the comments is appropriate, but doing so leaves the comments out of context. Some mechanism of refinement which avoids this problem would be great. Many comments develop into something that should (essentially) be their own post on a new topic. Doing so is currently cumbersome, and a mechanism for making that shift would be helpful.
4. Time commitment is a problem. Making a stream of good posts is hard and takes awhile. Naturally, some were (and even still are) stored up, but that store is finite, and eventually will be exhausted. Since I’m unwilling to compromise quality, this means the rate of posts may eventually fall. The obvious solution to this is to invite other posters. (Which I have with Alex Gray and Drew Bagnell.) Consider yourself invited. Email me (jl@hunch.net) with anything you consider worth posting.

It’s not all bad and I plan to continue experimenting. Several of the discussions have been quite interesting, and I often find that the process of writing posts helps clarify my understanding. Creating a little bit more understanding seems like it is worthwhile.