Things I like to read (1)

As a researcher (and teacher), I spend a substantial part of my time reading (what a privilege), although - admittedly - I should read more than I do. Clearly, my reading involves many journal articles, to keep up with relevant developments in the literature.
But, increasingly over the last years, an important part of communication about research issues has moved to the online domain. Here, Twitter is an important channel, but I don't enjoy reading Twitter because my impression is that it encourages simplifications even in situations when in-depth explanations are required or helpful. That's the reason why I prefer blogs. I read several blogs, almost on a daily basis. I've learned a lot by reading blogs, and I keep learning a lot by reading blogs.

In no particular order, I will provide links to the blogs (and articles) that I particularly like, and I will update this through new posts over the next weeks.

Today: Simply Statistics.This is a blog I've been following for the last few years. The authors add new posts every few days, and the posts are a healthy mix of facts (about statistics, applications, data, developments in the way we think about statistics) and (well-founded) opinions. This blog informed my way of thinking about Data Science quite a lot. Recent posts that touch many important aspects of what Data Science is about are this one or this one.
But they also share fun stuff like this list of 10 things R can do that might surprise you. Or (half-fun, half-serious, I guess) this one about bar plots, and why they must die.
In any case, their blog is highly recommended.

I sometimes hear the opinion that blogs (and similar sources) will replace the academic literature (e.g., journals) in the not-too-far-future. I disagree. Why? Here are two reasons. (1) The brand. Blogs work for people (authors) who have a brand, a reputation. If a person, unknown in a given academic community, starts a blog, the insights and opinions shared on that blog will only have little impact because readers do not have a reason to believe that this source is better, better informed, or more relevant than other web pages or blogs. Journals, in contrast, have a reputation, an impact factor. Of course, we all know that this is a bad measure for quality, but I am convinced that readers will associate a higher credibility with a claim brought forward in, say Nature, than, e.g., in some blog. Because there are gatekeepers at journals - as imperfect as they may be - which are absent elsewhere. Clearly, large blogs have active comment sections, but this is restricted to large, popular blogs like Andrew Gelman's. (2) Passage of Time. Blogs are nice for rapid communication about timely topics. But nobody can keep the author of some academic blog from turning off that blog. Then the content is gone, invisible to the public, and all references to this content are useless. With journals, this is different. Journal have some sort of institutional commitment to keep the content available, and even if a journal at some point disappears, the content will still be available to in many libraries.
Hence, I believe, blogs serve an important function to ignite discussion, disseminate knowledge, opinions, and insights in a rapid way, but journals, I believe, are here to stay. Let's revisit this prediction 10 years from now.