Blogging
laelaps | January 5, 2009
I'm a little late to the game on this tidbit, but in case you haven't heard, please welcome the newest addition to the Sb family, Rebecca Skloot! She's a (*GASP*) journalist who has written some fantastic pieces for the New York Times and she also has a new book in the works called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Her blog, Culture Dish, can be found here.
Anne-Marie Hodge, author of Pondering Pikaia, is one of my favorite science bloggers, and she has just started up a new science blog on the Nature Network. Even though Pondering Pikaia will remain active, Anne-Marie will be…
clock | January 4, 2009Anne-Marie Hodge, the author of the delightful blog Pondering Pikaia has just started a new blog on the Nature Network and named it Endless Forms.
The Dispersal of Darwin has moved from Blogger to Wordpress, so please adjust your bookmarks and feeds for both of them.
skookumchick | January 4, 2009As I've mentioned, I'm co-organizing a session on gender and science blogging, with a particular focus on how we can be allies, as well as on the intersection of gender, race and class in blogging.
The official conversation has been a little slow, but while I've been distracted, others have been writing interesting posts, with even more interesting comment threads and responses. I'm hoping bringing it up again will keep the conversation going and might prompt ideas for the ScienceOnline session.
In my last post, ecogeofemme askedhow ally was defined in this context. On one hand, as Lab…
laelaps | January 3, 2009I am proud to announce that my post, "Who scribbled all over Darwin's work?", was selected for inclusion in the 3rd (2008) edition of The Open Laboratory. You can see a list of all the winners here , and I am pleased to see that my post will be printed alongside work from many of my favorite science bloggers. Congratulations are also due to Bora, Jennifer Rohn, and the judges, who have worked so hard on this project!
[As an aside, I am glad that this year I had no idea when the winning entries would be announced. Last year I was pacing the floor the night the results were scheduled to be…
aardvarchaeology | January 3, 2009The fifty-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Testimony of the Spade. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology!
Submissions for the next carnival will be sent to me. The next open hosting slot is on 28 January, weeks from now. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. No need to be an anthro pro.
sciencewoman | January 2, 2009There's a cool new blog on the Sb block, Culture Dish, written by Rebecca Skloot, author of the forth-coming "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks." As Skloot's sidebar says: "[The book] tells the story of HeLa -- the first immortal human cell line ever grown in culture (pictured in the blog's banner) -- the woman those cells came from, and the family she left behind. " The blog already has an awesome post up about all kinds of service animals, as well as a link to a terrifying, saddening, and frustrating account of dog packs mauling other dogs and people in New York City. Though Culture…
clock | January 1, 2009The Psychology of Cyberspace is a course taught by John Suler in the Department of Psychology at the Science and Technology Center at Rider University. The website is a collection of a large number of thought-provoking essays on various aspects of human behavior online:
This hypertext book explores the psychological aspects of environments created by computers and online networks. It presents an evolving conceptual framework for understanding how people react to and behave within cyberspace: what I call "the psychology of cyberspace" - or simply "cyberpsychology." Continually being revised…
laelaps | December 31, 2008Two thousand and eight has, to say the least, been a bizarre year for me. As I sit here watching the snow fall on a farm* nestled just outside the sprawl of Target stores and mini-malls in suburban New Jersey, I am not entirely sure how I feel about it.
*[My wife and I are pet-sitting for a friend, a welcome respite from life in our tiny apartment.]
Academically, 2008 has presented many trials. The mathematics courses I took, in particular, crushed my soul and made me miserable. Even the classes I did enjoy did little to mitigate the stress and frustration caused by the rest of my coursework…
clock | December 30, 2008This article is almost two years old, but it is perhaps even more current today than it was when it first appeared:
Pretend for a second that you're a CEO. Would you reveal your deepest, darkest secrets online? Would you confess that you're an indecisive weakling, that your colleagues are inept, that you're not really sure if you can meet payroll? Sounds crazy, right? After all, Coke doesn't tell Pepsi what's in the formula. Nobody sane strips down naked in front of their peers. But that's exactly what Glenn Kelman did. And he thinks it saved his business.
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The…
clock | December 30, 2008Introducing Sex, Drugs and Rockin' Venom: Confessions of an Extreme Scientist by Dr. Bryan Grieg Fry, the venom biologist!
clock | December 30, 2008Go say Hello to Rebecca Skloot, the newest addition to the Scienceblogs.com family, and her blog Culture Dish.
Check out her About page and the first post.
clock | December 29, 2008Some guy named Mulshine, who is apparently an ancient journalist (remember: generation is mindset, not age), penned one of those idiotic pieces for Wall Street Journal, willingly exposing his out-datedness and blindness to the world - read it yourself and chuckle: All I Wanted for Christmas Was a Newspaper:
This highlights the real flaw in the thinking of those who herald the era of citizen journalism. They assume newspapers are going out of business because we aren't doing what we in fact do amazingly well, which is to quickly analyze and report on complex public issues. The real reason they…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2008
Today marks Aard's second anniversary. I'm still having fun and hope you are too! Looking at October and November, the blog had about 950 unique readers daily and was ranked #24 out of 74 blogs on Sb. I recently updated the Best of Aard page for those of you who want to check out some past goodies.
For much of these two years I have bragged in the left-hand side-bar that Aard had the highest Technorati rank among the net's archaeology blogs. This is no longer so, and the main reason is that I have stopped hosting blog carnivals. Technorati ranks a blog according to the number and quality of…
clock | December 27, 2008Slate has this good article with the same title (yes, read it if you are interested in becoming or becoming a better blogger). I agree with everything in it, except for one piece of advice that I often see bandied about but think is totally wrong:
Don't be too wordy. HuffPo says that 800 words is the outer-length limit for a blog post; anything longer will turn people off.
No. No. No.
This feeds nicely in what Ezra Klein wrote about it:
The specialized posts mix with the generalized posts -- in my case, health wonkery rubs elbows with garden variety political punditry -- and the two cross-…
clock | December 26, 2008New Year's Day, a time to reminisce about the past year, perhaps to analyze its ups and downs, and in the blogosphere: to link to one's "Best of" posts for all of those who missed them.
I posted 2960 posts so far this year - with six days to go I may reach 3000. It is not easy sifting through all of those, so I picked the highlights for you here. Some are milestones, some are examples from multi-post series, some are posts that provoked a lot of comments, some are posts that took a lot of time and effort to write, and some are, well, just very long. There were other posts that elicited a…
clock | December 25, 2008If so, record it, or write it down, upload a podcast or post on your blog. And:
After the overwhelming response to the National Day of Listening, we are hoping to pass on a new holiday idea: For everyone who did an interview surrounding the National Day of Listening (or are thinking about recording a loved one), making a copy of it and pairing it with a paperback copy of our book, "Listening is an Act of Love," provides a meaningful touch to the holiday season, and gives that special someone even more incredible stories to read! The book as well as more DIY recording tips can be linked to…
clock | December 24, 2008I found this quite intriguing:
Those thinking that online social networking is a substitute for face-to-face interactions might want to think again. Recent research in psychology suggests there are some benefits to real-life socializing that the Internet just can't provide; researchers at Stanford University have published a report in Psychological Science called "Synchrony and Cooperation" that indicates engaging in synchronous activities (e.g., marching, singing, dancing) strengthens social attachments and enables cooperation. As most of our online social networking to date is based on…
clock | December 24, 2008Eleven years ago, two or three guys with awesome programming skilllz sat down and almost simultaneously, and not knowing of each other at the time, wrote the first blogging software. Dave Winer was one of those guys and, like the rest of them, strongly dislikes the "who was the first blogger" frenzy that sometimes sweeps through the blogosphere. He was one of them, but nobody was "the first".
If you read or write blogs, it is thanks to guys like Dave. If you are reading this post in an RSS feed reader, it's because Dave invented and wrote the RSS. If you have ever been to an "unconference…