Reed's Ruminations: A Blog by Dan Reed

Blogging at CACM Also

When I was a graduate student at Purdue, just after the dinosaurs died and the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event was recent news, I was an avid reader of the Communications of the ACM. CACM, pronounced Kak-M, was an ACM research journal that contained great articles that spanned the breadth of computing. As the ACM attempted to deliver greater value to the majority of its members, who were practitioners, rather than researchers, CACM morphed into a practice-oriented publication. Those of us in research gradually turned to other publication venues and rarely spent much time reading CACM. All of that has now changed.

My friend, Moshe Vardi (Rice University), is the new editor-in-chief of CACM, with a mission and mandate to revamp CACM and make it more relevant, more readable and more relevant – both to practitioners and to researchers. The print version of the new CACM has been well received, and ACM is about to launch a new CACM web site this month (March 2009).

Several of us will be blogging for the new CACM web site, offering perspectives on science policy, research, computing technology and societal implications. Look for me at the CACM web site soon, under Blog@CACM. (And yes, I will continue to blog on Reed's Ruminations at www.hpcdan.org as well.)

Twitter and Tweets

I've been playing with Twitter over the weekend. Twitter, for those who don't know, can be viewed as SMS meets blogging (i.e., microposts on current or daily activities). The Sunday New York Times had an article on Twitter and Twittervision, a Google maps mashup with Twitter that shows near real-time Twitter posts around the world.