PhDs on blogosphere

This blog seems to have absolutely no visitors (other than my three, may be two these days, loyal readers). I guess it is partly my fault that I've an account on blogger rather than on livejournal, myspace, facebook or one of those social networking sites, where more of my friends would stumble upon it. I detest social networking sites pretty much for same reasons the respectable physicists in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy detested the use of Finite Improbablity for breaking ice at parties: I'm never invited to these social networking sites, nor am I ever added to anybody's friends list.

Yesterday, I was lamenting the poor readership of this blog to Maccanena, and she mentioned this blogging community of postdocs. Starting with propterdoc's blog, I went on a link-clicking spree which wasted the rest of my afternoon. A few had clever titles like Minor Revisions, which led me to consider some silly titles like Results & Discussion, or Conclusions & Future Work for my own blog. Some seemed to rediscover the academic concept: if you don't publish, you don't exist, a fact I, and some of my friends, were sorely made aware of by our diligent advisors back in our PhD days. However, one common thread in all these blogs: folks worrying about results, publications, funding or the lack of it.

One thing I noticed is that much of the postdoc bloggers I've come across so far are mostly women, at least they sound that way on the blog. Does it mean that there are more women postdocs than men postdocs, or does it mean that women vent more than men online on blogs?


P.S. For those of you who didn't get the Hitchhiker's reference: "The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub- Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for this - partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties."

P.P.S. You should check out the xkcd's strip on the trouble with Wikipedia.