Some academic fields have a “blog community” that caters to the academics in the field. A few blogs, taken together, perform the function of the “town newspaper” for this academic group, covering new results, problems, funding issues, conferences, gossip, as well as related philosophical and sociological musings. Theoretical CS is certainly one such field (as I mentioned in aprevious post). Math (or at least some sub-areas in it) seem to have something similar (e.g. Tao, Gowers, Kalai, the secret blogging seminar…), and I think also some parts of physics. I tried looking for such communities in areas surrounding algorithmic game theory, but couldn’t really find the type of academic-community-focused blogosphere that I was looking for. The Academic blogs Wiki was of only little help.
Here are some areas that I am looking at:
- Theoretical Economics — While there are many many economics blogs, some highly popular (like the Freakonomics blog), many of them seem to address current economic affairs more than issues directly aimed at the economic academic community, not to mention the theoretical economics community which I was looking for. One blog which is close is Market Design.
- Social choice theory — I couldn’t find anything. I’m not sure that this is a thriving community any more even though there is an active journal.
- Game Theory — Despite a very useful web-site with game-theory resoures, I couldn’t find a single blog devoted to game theory (beyond the previously mentioned Market Design Blog and a blog called game theorist which is actually about raising children). It would seem to me that the field of game theory — used by many but actively studied by few — would be a natural candidate for an academic blog.
- Multi-agent systems — A website called Multiagent systems seems to have very little activity; I couldn’t find other blogs in the field (or actually in AI in general) with any game-theory tendencies.
So, can any readers help?
Turing's Invisible Hand 
Hi Noam
I have been trying a similar (not very successful) search, as someone with research interests in combinatorics, social choice and algorithms. If I enter “social choice blog” into Google the top entry is my own (perhaps the search results are customized somehow?), and it doesn’t look like much is around in that area. Similarly I was surprised at the lack of game theory. For people like me working far away and unlikely to attend many physical conferences, email, blogs, etc, are even more important, and I would like to see more interaction. I was surprised that there is apparently not a large community of people studying game theory per se – is this really true, has the action all moved into application areas?
I want to make some observations, which may be of interest coming from an outsider (new entrant to some of these fields, and geographically far away). The community you describe crosses traditional boundaries, and this may be part of the problem.
1. There are substantial differences in publication practices between fields, and associated value judgements. (Theoretical) computer science and AI researchers publish an amazing number of papers, particularly in conferences. Publishing essentially the same result in a conference proceedings and a journal is common. In mathematics and economics these practices are not followed (as evidence, I present the recent Neal Koblitz “CS people publish too much” controversy and the info on the TARK 2009 website about journal publications). It is a short step from publishing everything you ever think about to blogging about it as well. I would predict (have not checked!) that theoretical CS and theoretical physics would top the blog activity rankings. Since most game theorists work in social sciences, we should not be so surprised that game theory blogs are not as active.
2. The impression I have of the kind of academic blogs you discuss is that many of them are focused on communicating with the “in-group” of people already known to the author. The TCS people seem particularly inclined this way, but perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that what these blogs deal with is mostly a rather narrow “US/Israeli TCS” practised by a fairly small fraction of the overall “theoretical computer science” community (see recent posts on Computational Complexity for the clear evidence of this divide. At worst this degenerates into insular, idle chatter and reinforces conformist tendencies and fashion trends in research. Maybe we don’t need any more blogs!
Of course I subscribe to TCS blogs including Shtetl-Optimized, Computational Complexity and enjoy them overall, despite the issue above.
Finally, there may be a language issue. Most academic blogs will be in English, since that is the language used by most journals. But it is much easier for me to blog in English than a French researcher, for example. So perhaps fields that are relatively strong in places like France and relatively weak in English-speaking countries (for example average-case algorithm analysis) won’t get as much blogospherical representation. I don’t know whether game theory fits into that.
Thanks for these many ideas. A few comments:
1) You wrote “If I enter “social choice blog” into Google the top entry is my own (perhaps the search results are customized somehow?)” — Indeed. I get http://www.marketbasedcontrol.com/blog/index.php/?p=11
2) You wrote “It is a short step from publishing everything you ever think about to blogging about it as well.” I would evaluate the first (publishing everything) as bad and the second (blogging everything) as good….
3) You wrote “[TCS] blogs deal with is mostly a rather narrow “US/Israeli TCS” practised by a fairly small fraction of the overall “theoretical computer science” community”. I would say that “US TCS” is also practiced all over Europe (see ICALP tracks A&C). It is true that Europe also has “track B” but it is clear that track A is the global one. (and, yes, Israel is part of the US this way)
“I would evaluate the first (publishing everything) as bad and the second (blogging everything) as good….”
I strongly agree.
I have posted on this topic on my own blog, where I can revise it as time permits (add more links), and not take up any more space here. Thanks for starting this blog, which is high on my reading list!
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mcw/blog/2009/04/15/theoretical-computer-science-from-the-outside/
Sorry – a typo in the URL for my website will send you somewhere strange. This has the correct one.
Tyler Cowen made an astute observation about academic blogs in that they often follow the loss-leader model. The blog author gives away interesting nuggets of thought to promote interest in an area about which they have written a book. If you look at the most popular economics blogs (Freakonomics, Marginal Revolution, Greg Mankiw, etc) all do very lucrative business selling books. Perhaps it is just coincidence that people with books are more likely to blog (perhaps they are just better writers?). Also, I think Mark’s point number 1 is important reason for the dearth.
That’s interesting, although I doubt that any of the TCS bloggers have a book to sell (except myself, but our deal with the publisher was no royalties in exchange for a low book price, so there’s no financial motive there…)
I think that getting attention via a blog can likely be “monetized” in other ways other than selling a book.
Jeff Ely recently started blogging at
http://cheeptalk.wordpress.com/