Re: Publish or (gulp) Perish

["Matthew F. Ringel" <ringel () net tufts edu>]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2004 at 03:01:56PM -0500, Daniel Golding wrote:
> Slightly off-topic...
>
> Most technical fields have standard journals that they use to publish
> interesting findings and new ways of doing things. Everything from Nature to
> the JAMA. Here's the question for the group: Do these sorts of publications
> exist in the networking/carrier/internetworking space, and if not, should
> they?
>
> Some possible examples (if anyone reads them):
> SIGCOMM (http://www.acm.org/sigcomm/),
> BCR (http://www.bcr.com/bcrmag/),
> Cisco's IPJ (http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/759/).


USENIX's ";login" (http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/) is
another good example.

> I'm leaving off "news" publications like Light Reading and Network World.
> Any thoughts? Have NANOG powerpoint presentations made these sorts of
> journals obsolete? :)


I certainly hope not.  Powerpoint has its place, but it's not really a
format for the distribution of research information.  The information
density just isn't there.  That, and without the audio of the
presentation to go along with the slides, most of the actual content
is lost.

I believe that NANOG should have an actual journal of some kind,
likely with issues on a thrice-yearly basis. I'd wager that most NANOG
presentations have a paper's worth of information backing them.
Writing out the information in publication form not only makes it a
useful reference for later perusal, but gives something you can point
to as part of a concrete body of work that you've created, the
benefits of which I leave as an exercise for the reader.


                                                        ....Matthew

------
Matthew F. Ringel
Sr. Network Engineer
Tufts University