Graham Leuschke wonders how to make his blogging count in his coming job search. I know Leuscke from his blogging but never knew he was a mathematician (although that makes perfect sense). He has a curriculum vitae (CV), a commutative algebra site, and his weblog. 

How do I, or more importantly, a hiring/promotion committee, determine its scholarly value? And how do I best explain that value to people who may not previously have considered its existence?

He cites Steven D. Krause's Where Do I List This on My CV? Considering the Values of Self-Published Web Sites:  

"Given the high value that most institutions put on scholarship that appears in refereed journals or in books produced by well-respected presses, how are innovative, intellectually valuable, well-researched, self-published Web sites to be counted in the processes of promotion, merit, tenure, review, and recognition?"

Weblogs are just coming on the radar. Ask around, you'll hear them treated as "alternate media" projects, like demo reels, home brew projects, performance art.

One factor in candidate evaluation: comparability of materials. I can compare Mary's CV with Bob's CV, compare essays, dissertations, theses, interviews, transcripts, references. How do you compare weblogs? Or include one person's weblog when the other person doesn't have one?

The nature of blogging makes comparison and assessment harder. It isn't organized. At least not in a way that helps. How does your blog help someone quickly answer:

• What does this person know? How much? How well?
• How has this person been growing professionally?
• What can this person do? Do for me?
• Who does this person connect with in the profession?
• How well does this person communicate in writiing? Good enough to get published in peer review journals? In respected industry rags?  

In usability terms, this is a different persona than the one usually consuming your blog. This persona's purpose is crisp (answer the above questions), noise sensitive (don't waste my time, answer the question).

Navigation and abstraction are vital. Do you expect the evaluator to wade through your 3000 posts to find the 10 most relevant? If you don't already, please:

• categorize your posts
• use titles
• create a master index of posts
• start using a spell checker if you need it
• write short abstracts linking to your many posts on key topics.  

People enter your home page, then read your last dozen posts or so; ten minutes' worth. Good luck if you've been posting drivel, personal, or controversial stuff (like that never happens!)

Back to Graham's CV.

It  is one web page, organized, easy to scan, read and print, lots of white space.

You'd know better than I: would potential employers or colleagues want to read your "Finite Cohen-Macaulay Type" dissertation or your undergraduate thesis on "Profinite Groups and Galois Cohomology"? No links there. Not listed with your research papers. 

Math always poses a problem with the web. MathML isn't ubiquitous so most professional mathematics publications wind up in Acrobat, PostScript, and dvi. Makes it harder to read on the web and difficult for Google and other search engines to find.

I like Graham's description of his research, list of people who do things like I do and the  Mathematics Genealogy Project. But they are not near his CV.

Do you have an objective for your next gig? Even if not on the CV itself, it is handy to have it written up in your cluster of career pages.

Nothing on the leuschke home page, log home page or About G that (a) clearly indicates your availability and (b) points where to find out more about you.

Let Graham know if you have more suggestions, especially if you work in academia.

 [aka Bloggers for Hire]