Scientopia: A new kind of online science blogging community

This past Monday morning a new science blogging community came online: Scientopia! From their Vision:

Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible.

As a community, we strive to be welcoming of anyone with an interest in science and its place in our world, regardless of any feature, whether extrinsic or intrinsic, which may act or have historically acted as a barrier to full participation in science or discourses about science

It's made up of 30 bloggers on 24 blogs, many of which are ones that have recently left science blogs or that are additional blogs by current SciBlings.

Here's a list of the bloggers:

• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Attack Polymerase
• Book of Trogool
• Candid Engineer in Academia
• Chemical BiLOLogy
• Child's Play
• Christina's LIS Rant
• Drugmonkey
• Galactic Interactions
• Good Math/Bad Math
• Neurotic Physiology
• Professor in Training
• Prof-Like Substance
• Sanitized for Your Protection
• Skulls in the Stars
• The Brain Confounds Everything
• The Questionable Authority
• The Urban Ethnographer
• This Scientific Life
• Thus Spake Zuska
• Voltage Gate
• White Coat Underground
• WhizBANG

Check out the Scientopia Code for more details on how this self-organizing community will be governing itself.

It's a fantastic opening line-up of great bloggers, one that would be the envy of any blogging network. Most were familiar to me but it's also great that there were a few that were unfamiliar. I don't hesitate to predict that within a year of so of this auspicious launch that their aggregated traffic will quite respectably compare with any science blogging network around (at least excluding a few traffic elephants in the ScienceBlogs room).

Those with eagle eyes will have noticed that both Christina's LIS Rant and Book of Trogool have left science blogs for Scientopia, leaving me as the sole remaining librarian blog here at ScienceBlogs. I'll admit to feeling a bit strange about the situation, but I also really want to wish Christina, Dorothea, Beth and Sarah all the best in their new home. We all need to do what makes the most sense for our own goals and for now staying here is what makes sense for me just like moving made sense for them. On the other hand, it also means that my posts will stick around longer on the Information Science feed on the home page ;-)

Wecome, Scitopia!

(BTW, how geeky do you have to be to immediately think Stephen Wolfram when you see the slogan, "A new kind of online science...")