Thanks for your interest in researchblogging.org. August has been a crazy month for us, with a bunch of us on vacation and a lot of work being done testing our new, improved site. This means that sometimes some spam comments have slipped through on the blog. I’m cleaning them up right now!

Your comments about the site are spot-on. One nice thing about our site is that it allows you to specify on a post-by-post basis whether you think your work is “serious” enough. You can have a frivolous post that doesn’t get aggregated, then write a reflective post informed by peer-reviewed research, that does.

Let us know if you have any questions about the site — we welcome your participation.

Dave

The discussions I saw there raised the issue of the Ph.D, but I thought the conclusion was that no, the Ph.D shouldn’t be a credential. Of course, you could raise an eyebrow at the question being raised in the first place, but even if one were one to heavily weight the Ph.D in their evaluation matrix, I think they’d be stymied by the number of anonymous or graduate student bloggers out there.

As to the gibberish – those are spam posts. The spammers don’t care about the comment, they’re just interested in getting the links out there. Normally, that would be a very bad sign that the blog is not being maintained, but since the spam posts are all dated this month, I think we have to assume that it is a side-effect of the site change. This blog probably isn’t being maintained in that time.