People around me at the lab keep talking about a French institutional blog platform named hypotheses.org. In fact it is well-known but no one is using it. The website is still a bit new, according to them they currently host a hundred blogs.
The main benefits are visibility and durability as it is institutional, well-referenced and competently maintained.
It is what it claims to be, which is also why I hesitated and finally chose to set up a basic personal website.
- First you need to fill out a form to get a registration, which is good in terms of label, but I don’t know how long or how often I am going to blog. I don’t want to request a service I might finally not use.
- The second reason is that it is very useful for people who do not want to deal with layout issues, all the pages look quite the same apart from backgrounds colors and a few images. I think it may be to maintain a global coherence on the website.
- It’s not that international, it’s not what it’s meant to be. Most of the articles are in French, and I don’t expect hypotheses.org to be known as a whole beyond the French borders, although Google indexes it quite good. (NB: “link:hypotheses.org” on Google : 274 results)
- Last, I think you’re supposed to write about your research and nothing else. But the fact is that from time to time most blogs do stray from their original topic, that’s what makes them more personal and maybe a bit catchier.
Here are the main reasons why I chose to have my own Wordpress blog. But who knows, as the blogosphere is evolving very fast and as I might not forever want to have a bit more freedom, I might think about getting my hypotheses.org blog someday. But not to soon.
Update: the situation is evolving, I now consider hypotheses.org as an option to make an archive of this blog.
Update 2: finally not, I think the platform is not flexible enough.