Blogs I Read: The Haystack Blog

It’s been quite the week in tech business news, with Adobe acquiring Omniture, Google acquiring reCAPTCHA and being rumored (falsely) to acquire Brightcove, Facebook announcing that is has over 300M users and is cash-flow positive, and Twitter closing a new round of funding at a $1B valuation. Recession? What recession?

But sometimes I like to get away from all that and turn back to my roots inside the ivory tower. And that leads me to one of my favorite university blogs: the Haystack Blog.

The Haystack Blog is published by faculty and grad students in the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) – specifically those in the Haystack group. Principal Investigator (and occasional dance instructor) David Karger is its most prolific blogger – you might have read some of his SIGIR 2009 posts or his debate with Stefano Mazzocchi about how to properly use RDF. But other people’s posts are just as interesting – check out the most recent post by Eirik Bakke about bridging the gap between spreadsheets and relational databases.

I wish that more universities and departments would encourage their faculty and students to blog. As Daniel Lemire has pointed out, it’s a great way for academic .. …

It’s been quite the week in tech business news, with Adobe acquiring Omniture, Google acquiring reCAPTCHA and being rumored (falsely) to acquire Brightcove, Facebook announcing that is has over 300M users and is cash-flow positive, and Twitter closing a new round of funding at a $1B valuation. Recession? What recession?

But sometimes I like to get away from all that and turn back to my roots inside the ivory tower. And that leads me to one of my favorite university blogs: the Haystack Blog.

The Haystack Blog is published by faculty and grad students in the MIT Computer Science and AI Lab (CSAIL) – specifically those in the Haystack group. Principal Investigator (and occasional dance instructor) David Karger is its most prolific blogger – you might have read some of his SIGIR 2009 posts or his debate with Stefano Mazzocchi about how to properly use RDF. But other people’s posts are just as interesting – check out the most recent post by Eirik Bakke about bridging the gap between spreadsheets and relational databases.

I wish that more universities and departments would encourage their faculty and students to blog. As Daniel Lemire has pointed out, it’s a great way for academic researchers to get their ideas out and build up their reputations and networks. He should know – he leads by example. Likewise, Haystack is setting a great example for university blogs, and is a credit to MIT and CSAIL.

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