Blogging
retrospectacle | September 24, 2007Glendon Mellow of The Flying Trilobite just finished this beautiful banner (currently rotating with Carl's) for me this weekend, and I thought it might be interesting to show the stages and though process behind his art. Our initial conversations about what I wanted in a banner were along the lines of, that I blog about neuroscience, Greys, student life, fun stuff, hearing, and going anywhere with that was fine with me.
Step 1. Thought about wing, an ear, and started with the Valkyrie type image. Thought about how cool it would be if Shelley was leading a gang with multiple-species, parrot…
clock | September 23, 2007The three-day Foodblogging event has started, with a reading/booksigning by Michael Ruhlman at the Regulator bookshop in Durham.
Among those in the audience were Reynolds Price, local bloggers Anton Zuiker and Brian Russell, as well as Anna Kushnir, foodblogger who drove all the way from Boston (OK, via Virginia) to attend the event.
I bought The Reach of a Chef and asked him what is the best way to get a kid/teenager who is interested in cooking started. He said that hands-on experience is essential and that one should carefully pick a course that focuses on basics and not on fancy gimmicks…
clock | September 23, 2007I was out and offline all day yesterday, so I missed this wonderful article by Dan Barkin in yesterdays' N&O (I just took the paper out of its plastic bag a few minutes ago):
Bloggers to talk science.
It tells you where Anton Zuiker comes from and where he is going next. The killer paragraph is this one:
The Web has evolved into a tribal Internet of passionate bloggers like Zuiker, and he has become a sort-of local brand. He's a quiet visionary. He's a low-key doer. He's a let's-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It's the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a…
clock | September 21, 2007Yesterday, PLoS ONE moved to the newest version of the TOPAZ platform. Rich Cave explains all the improvements that this move entails, including the citation download for articles, but one new feature that should really be exciting to bloggers are Trackbacks.
From now on, if you link to a PLoS ONE article in your post, that article will display a link back to your blog post (go to an article and look at the right side-bar, nested between the Discussions and Ratings). Thus, in addition to the conversation already going on in the commentary attached to the article itself, the readers will be…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007ScienceBlogs has two new additions: On Being A Scientist and a Woman and A Few Things Ill Considered.
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007Google Reader has an excellent feature which enables users to display items from the RSS feeds to which they are subscribed in a "link blog".
I set up one of these link blogs earlier this year, and displayed the RSS feed in the sidebar on my old blog. My shared items can be viewed here, and the feed for my link blog is here.
clock | September 20, 2007Go say Hello to the very latest addition to the Scienceblogs Universe - Coby Beck of A Few Things Ill Considered.
clock | September 20, 2007To Chris (an no, I am not the commenter who signed with "a sea cucumber" handle...).
clock | September 20, 2007I thought the LiveJournal debacle taught them a lesson. I guess not. Melissa posted about this a couple of weeks ago, and Tara did it today again because the issue has not been resolved yet. So did PZ Myers (Janet Stemwedel and Dr. Joan Bushwell also chime in). Facebook is deleting pictures of breastfeeding and banning users who post them. Now that Facebook is not just for college crowd, there are more and more moms and dads on the network, proudly showing off their offspring to the world. Including offspring in the moments of feeding bliss.
But, you know that in this country there are…
retrospectacle | September 20, 2007Perhaps you might have noticed my brand spanking new banner up there! It was just recently finished by my friend Carl Buell, blogger at Olduvai George and a phenomenal natural history illustrator. I love it, and hope you do too. At the moment, its slightly oversized so I'm gonna have to figure out how to make it fit perfectly, and accomodate the tabs up there.
I've also got another banner-in-progress, by Glendon Mellow who blogs over at The Flying Trilobite. Its still secret, and won't be done for another week or so, but when it is I plan on doing a 'making of' post showing off Glendon's…
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007Top science bloggers (including Bora, Carl, Abel Pharmboy, PZ and Razib) have been asked by The Scientist to nominate their favourite science blogs. You can see their choices, and nominate your own favourites, here.
clock | September 18, 2007The good folks at The Scientist asked a few of us to recommend some of the best and most interesting life science blogs. We have done so and the article is now online:
So, we at The Scientist are asking you to help compile the first list of the best life science blogs. Tell us what your favorite life science blogs are and why by clicking the button and leaving a comment, and we will publish a list of the most popular choices across the different areas of life sciences. With your help we hope to provide a list of who is currently hot in the science blogosphere, and why you should be reading…
clock | September 18, 2007The program of the Microsoft/RENCI conference is now up. They would not let me give a talk, but I'll have to make a poster (using the darned MS Power Point, I guess #$%^&*) which makes me pretty mad. Heck, there is some unknown talking about science blogs instead of me. Who made this decision?
Compared to the organizers of every other meeting this year, from SciFoo, to ConvergeSouth, to ASIS&T, to the panel at Harvard (and yes, our own Science Blogging Conference), these guys are positively Palaeolitic in their attitude - from the haughtily-official looking site, to the very idea…
aardvarchaeology | September 17, 2007Dear Reader, did you know that ScienceBlogs has a newsletter, the Weekly Recap? It's a way to stay somewhat on top of Sb's ever-proliferating forest of blogs. Subscribe here.
clock | September 17, 2007Seed Media Group, publisher of the Seed Magazine and the Seed Scienceblogs (the site you are on right now), made an announcement last week (PDF) about its new international partnership with Hubert Burda Media conglomerate:
The partnership will initially lead to the European development of ScienceBlogs, the largest online science community (www.scienceblogs.com). Since its launch in January 2006 by Seed Media Group, ScienceBlogs has grown to include 65 blogs across all areas of science, and attracted more than 1.7 million visits in August (Google Analytics), its twentieth straight month of…
clock | September 17, 2007Dave alerts us that the number of entries has ben winnowed to the top three finalists. Check them out and suggest modifications at the BPR3 blog. And vote:
clock | September 17, 2007There is a new online survey up, designed by some of my SciBlings, about the background and online habits of science bloggers and science blog readers (not just scienceblogs.com, but all science blogs). Please take a minute to respond:
This survey attempts to access the opinions of bloggers, blog-readers, and non-blog folk in regards to the impact of blogs on the outside world. The authors of the survey are completing an academic manuscript on the impact of science blogging and this survey will provide invaluable data to answer the following questions:
Who reads or writes blogs?
What are the…
retrospectacle | September 17, 2007What would happen if a handful of bloggers started asking questions about the impact of blogging on the "Real World"? What would change if the Academy was made more aware of science blogs, and that they may have an impact of science (for better or worse)? What would happen if a lot of people were asked questions about their opinions of blogs, and the results were published?
Well, its happening right now. Me and a few other bloggers are currently involved in writing a manuscript discussing the impact of science blogging, on, well "real" science. Is there one?
Let us know by taking our short…