The Best of February

I posted 126 times in February.

The Biggest Event of the month, of course, was the release of The Open Laboratory 2009, the fourth annual anthology of best writing on science blogs. And the first book review came out shortly after.

The Second Biggest Event of the month? It involves Science! I published a paper and blogged all about it - My latest scientific paper: Extended Laying Interval of Ultimate Eggs of the Eastern Bluebird.

Third Best Post of the month? I can't have a month pass by without writing something provocative - Why is 'scientists are bad communicators' trope wrong.

There was an interesting excercise going on Twitter recently, and I donned my rhetoricians's hat for Using Twitter to learn economy of words - try to summarize your research paper in 140 characters or less!

Early in February, there were several interesting Science Blogging News including the ResearchBlogging.org Awards. Later, the finalists were announced. Winners? Next month.

I went to the AAAS meeting in San Diego, but did not blog much from there, because there was no wifi and I was not regarded as press. My co-panelist Dennis Meredith did a fun presentation, which is available online. Our session had a lot of coverage, which I collected here. A few other Sciblings went to AAAS and I compiled their blog posts (with some commentary) here.

Following ScienceOnline2010, I started interviewing some of the participants. In February, I posted Q&As with Ken Liu, Maria Droujkova, Hope Leman, Tara Richerson, Carl Zimmer, Marie-Claire Shanahan, John Timmer, Dorothea Salo, Jeff Ives and Fabiana Kubke. Since there was so much conference blogging about the state of science journalism, I collected all the links about the topic in one place. And almost every day I posted one of the videos from the sessions and events at ScienceOnline2010 as well.

Some North Carolina science journalism/blogging projects I am involved with are getting noticed by the outside world, so I had to blog about it.

I wrote two posts highlighting some of the youngest science bloggers out there and asked readers to post comments on their blogs. Then I had to add a similar third post as more such student bloggers surfaced and needed ecnouragement in their blogs' comment sections.

I went to see the new shark exhibit and a shark talk at the NC Museum of Natural Science and wrote about them: Megalodon and other sharks at Darwin Day.

Cool site of the week? I introduced Aves 3D.

Work-related, PLoS Store unveiled its Spring Collection: T.rex, Space, lively colors, mugs, and future scientists - the PLoS Store Spring Collection. As always on the 1st of the month, I announced January 2010 PLoS ONE Blog Pick Of The Month