Why write a blog?

Well, why not. It seems like everyone else is.

I’ve been racking my brains to decide what I have to blog, or rather what is interesting enough to share with people. My field is computers; specifically research. I’ve been spending a few years researching free/open source software now, and I think I’ve got into the stride of things enough now to start to write about it.

In this blog, most of the time I plan my entries to fall into one of three categories:

1. Posts about my research: I’ll share my various little findings that might be of interest to people who want to understand more about free/open source. I’ll try and make them as to understand as possible — if you want the real technical treatment, I’ll point you to the technical paper.
2. About approaches to research: I also want to pass on the methods and tools you can use to carry out research on software. I hope this will be of interest to practitioners as well as researchers.
3. Videos: Another little pet project of mine (called Computer Floss) is to produce a series of videos for a general audience that explains all the various facets of open source. I’ve already begun, and you can see them over at:

http://youtube.com/user/directrod

Don’t ask why my username there is directrod.