Blogging
clock | July 17, 2008I've said it before and I said it again, and I heard other people say it repeatedly (e.g., Anton): blog is software.
It's up to every individual (or group, or organization, or company, or political entity) to put it to creative use.
Blog is not content. Content is what someone puts on a blog.
Medium is not the message. Though medium affects the message, of course, and content found on blogs is affected by the ease of use, extremely low cost, and frequency of updating, as well as social communication norms that develop over time.
This, this and this are expansions on that theme, mostly.…
laelaps | July 16, 2008Bora has got the first edition of the history of science carnival The Giant's Shoulders up at A Blog Around the Clock. There's lots of great stuff, and I certainly recommend that you give it a look.
Speaking of carnivals, after giving it some thought I'd decided to pick up The Boneyard again, albeit in a slightly modified form. Keep your eyes peeled for an announcement about the new format this week.
clock | July 14, 2008There is now a Sleep and Circadian group on Graduate Junction so if you are a student or postdoc in the field, and enough of you join up, we can see if can get some discussions going....
clock | July 14, 2008What is Web 2.0? Ideas, technologies and implications for education by Paul Anderson:
The report establishes that Web 2.0 is more than a set of 'cool' and new technologies and services, important though some of these are. It has, at its heart, a set of at least six powerful ideas that are changing the way some people interact. Secondly, it is also important to acknowledge that these ideas are not necessarily the preserve of 'Web 2.0', but are, in fact, direct or indirect reflections of the power of the network: the strange effects and topologies at the micro and macro level that a billion…
laelaps | July 14, 2008John Wilkins recently announced that he has an article about science blogging in press over at Trends in Ecology & Evolution, and many congratulations to him. The piece is definitely worth a look, appraising science blogs in terms of how they impact science communication and may benefit historians, but there was one aspect of the paper that bothered me. While many science bloggers are graduate students and researchers (as mentioned in the paper) there are many, like myself, who do not have such ties to academic institutions. Indeed, there are many bloggers who can write eloquently and…
aardvarchaeology | July 11, 2008Everybody with an interest in anthropology and archaeology who isn't lost in some green summery haze far from the nearest internet connection -- it's time to contribute good new blog entries to next week's Four Stone Hearth blog carnival. You needn't have written them yourself: if you've found something worth reading recently, submit it to Tim at Remote Central.
clock | July 7, 2008My friend, neighbor and uber-blogger Pam Spaulding, has an article about her in today's New & Observer. Very nice! Good read. And also, Happy Birthday, Pam - what a great present you got from the corporate media today ;-)
laelaps | July 7, 2008Last summer I started up the paleontology blog carnival The Boneyard, a bi-weekly gathering of links featuring the best of blogging about fossils. Sadly the carnival has now become defunct, and outside of Will (who has admirably tried to kick me in the butt to get it going again) not many people seem to miss it. Even when the carnival was active there were frequent delays, few actual submissions, and other problems. Many of these complications were my fault as I did not manage it as attentively as I should have, but it was always difficult to gauge just how interested everyone was when hosts…
laelaps | July 5, 2008
Are science writers starting to suffer from blogging burnout? It seems that way. For one reason or another a number of bloggers (including three of my favorites) have seriously pondered the question of giving up on science blogging (or at least leaving Sb) since the summer began. Why are so many writers stuck in the doldrums?
Blogging is a personal thing and the reasons why any given person writes (or stops writing) depends on a lot of factors unique to that individual. So many bloggers pondering the question of quitting has made me wonder why I keep writing. Although my writing primarily…
aardvarchaeology | July 5, 2008
The forty-fourth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Archaeology and anthropology, and all about luta livre!
Luta livre is a broad term referring to wrestling in Portuguese. In Brazil, it may also refer to a martial art that resembles catch wrestling. With the introduction of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, where Brazilian fighter Royce Gracie dominated the field with apparent ease, many English language martial arts publications rushed to find and translate older Brazilian articles regarding the history of Gracie jiu-jitsu. It was common knowledge that the…
clock | July 5, 2008Thursday, July 10
6:00 - 8:00 PM
With support from our friends at Burroughs Wellcome Fund, SCONC (Science Communicators of North Carolina) is hosting an introduction to podcasting (think of it as radio over the Internet). National authority Ryan Irelan of Podcast Free America will lead a two-hour session at Sigma Xi on NC 54 in the Research Triangle Park. (click here for directions) Please RSVP to Ernie Hood no later than Tuesday, July 8, or you might go hungry. (bkthrough AT earthlink DOT net)
aardvarchaeology | July 2, 2008Here's an interesting development. Top science bloggers have become a commodity hot enough that a situation like that in European football is emerging. Players are getting snatched from team to team through hostile buyout (Carl Zimmer of The Loom), and the number of really good non-pro players is dwindling (Phil Plait the Bad Astronomer just went pro).
I'm not sure if Carl got offered better pay than at Sb. Both bloggers did get steady writing gigs as columnists for Discover Magazine, which translates to some money (though most likely not much). In an attention-based economy, the market is…
laelaps | July 2, 2008So the big news finally came out yesterday; Carl and Phil have moved on over to blogs run by Discover (which also houses Reality Base, Better Planet, 80 Beats, Disco Blog). With Jennifer starting up an additional blog over at the Discovery Channel site (which has a collection of space blogs) the past few months have marked an influx of science bloggers into a variety of well-known media outlets. (I may eventually have a similar announcement in the future, but no worries; I'm not going anywhere.) Is all this shuffling and moving to newer digs good for science blogging?
Although some people…
neurophilosophy | July 1, 2008It's been exactly one year since I moved to ScienceBlogs.com. In that time, I've written 540 posts which have generated over half a million page views and about 1,800 comments.
Below is a brief summary of other blog stats, including my top ten posts and referrers.
My ten most popular posts are:
1. Amazing boomerang photo (15,433 page views)
2. The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy (14,605)
3. Unusual penetrating brain injuries (13,875)
4. An illustrated history of trepanation (10,175)
5. The left brain/ right brain myth (7,497)
6. Experimenting with a four-headed penis (6,669)
7.…
neurophilosophy | July 1, 2008
The folks at Nature Network have organized the Science Blogging 2008 Conference, which will take place on Saturday, August 30th at the Royal Institution in London.
The programme for the event was put online earlier today. I'll be moderating this discussion between Anna Kushnir, Jenny Rohn and Grrl Scientist:
Mistrust of scientists is common, and misinterpretation of scientific results rampant. Science blogs can serve as a bridge between scientists and the general public. Blogs build a community of scientists in which they can discuss the peculiarities of their jobs, their work, and their…
clock | July 1, 2008Conference Programme for the Science Blogging 2008: London is now online. I wish I could afford to go - it looks delicious! I hope everyone there takes and posts a lot of pictures, videos, podcasts and blog-posts so we can all vicariously participate.
clock | July 1, 2008You have probably already heard that Carl Zimmer has moved his blog The Loom from scienceblogs.com to a new URL (which, of course, you need to bookmark) of the new The Loom.
As he started his journalistic career at the Discover magazine, this was a hard invitation to reject. Discover has just started their own blog network. Carl is not the only celebrity to move - Phil Plait has also moved his Bad Astronomy blog from here to the new Bad Astronomy site.
As of now, it is impossible to see all of their blogs - there is no blogroll yet - but so far I could see Discoblog, 80 beats, Better Planet…
laelaps | July 1, 2008The past few six months have seen a lot of changes here at scienceblogs.com. A new wave of bloggers came in, super readers were recruited, channel photos posted, and lots of other cool stuff, but one of the biggest changes is the amount of traffic. According to a release that popped in my e-mail yesterday, traffic to ScienceBlogs shot up to about 14 million visits during the first six months of 2008, an all-time high and 60% increase over the same time period in 2007.
I really am proud to be a part of ScienceBlogs. I truly consider blogging to be one of the most valuable things that I do and…