The links to Feministe and 3 Quarks Daily in your post #8
need to be switched.

By the way, I notice that you’re using a truncated feed for Cosmic Variance. If you go to our Feedburner feed, you get the entire post.

As to the physics-only idea: this does sound like work. Perhaps an alternative (which may be just as much work, I don’t know) is to automatically display only the first paragraph of posts, and have the entire post appear if you click on the title. I don’t mean that you go to another page, but that the post is hidden from view until you click; that’s what we do with the blogrolls on our sidebar, or what Crescat Sententia does with its longer posts. Then people could zoom through the posts on topics they weren’t interested in, only expanding the ones that caught their fancy.

[edit, edit]

I started writing another huge comment here, but decided against it (how much page space can a person take in a comment area that is not his own?) and instead posted my response on Something Similar. Would love to hear your comments on it.

Sean: When I first ran into the idea of Planets, I was also hesitant. The fear of losing the individuality of presentation was in my head, along with other fears such as “How do I know who commenting on the posts?”. But these fears were assuaged as I used them.

I was confounded by how easily commentary arose between authors on the planets and how much easier and quicker I discovered new trends and ideas. I found that it was the text that mattered the most and that, as long as the presentation did not distract, the blogs I enjoyed reading the most were the ones where the text outshined any of the decoration. The best website designs are those that let the reader easily read. (I think Mixed States could be much improved in this regard. David Hogg emailed me an aspect of this issue a while ago and I have crafted some new solutions that I have some time to finish now that that classes are out.)

And I found that when I was interested enough in a post to comment on it, clicking a link to find out was not a chore. I would love for feeds to come with a link to a comments section for each post along with a number of comments made, but this is not a standard, yet, and it pales in comparison to what is gained.

It was not until I became a maintainer of a planet that I truly realized how it broadened my experience. I began running into blogs and people showing me vast new worlds of intriguging elegance and enticing inelegance where I had not thought to look before. We all find ourselves seeing only our own little realms and lose sight of the greater picture at some point in our lives. Seeing Big Physics from the inside, the surprisingly swift evolution of quantum information theory, the startling immensity of astronomy and the continuous reorganization of string theory all together has made me (to swipe an old cliché) made me fall for physics all over again. The running dialogues have pushed my mind in ways I never expected but will always love.

Try it for a few weeks and I think you’ll find yourself liking it more than you expect and maybe, if I did this well, loving it. Its been banking roughly

(Oh, and an easier to remember URL for Mixed Stats is http://mixedstates.somethingsimilar.com )

Lubos: I’ve tried not to discriminate based on my political views when constructing Mixed States. I take a very old-school liberal/utilitarian line of reasoning when it comes to such matters. It was, at times, difficult to include them in something that was “my work” (as much as it could be as an aggregate) because I so vehemently disagreed with almost everything some of the authors at Mixed States would write.

Everyone Who Slogged Through This Comment: Sorry for the unwieldy amount of text. I’m sure I could shorten it but it would require a few more hours of work.

Even after those years, I still find it kind of funny that the word “liberal” is used as an equivalent of “socialist” – because it means just the opposite in Central Europe.

(Also, could you please stop referring to “the internets” as opposed to “the internet”? It really grates. On the other hand, if the Chinese government has its way I suppose we will end up, in essence, with two or more internets. And then there is Internet 2…)