Category Archives: Blogging

Way back when there were just a handful of liberal political bloggers, The American Street was one of them. Kevin Hayden has, over the years, helped and promoted many a blogger, gathered round all those lone voices and built a community out of them – a community that is quick to help one of its own when needed (and it helped me a couple of times in the past). Now it is time to pay back – Kevin was hurt by the collapsing housing bubble and needs your help. Not much – a couple of bucks each.
And once you are done there and still have some cash to spare, there is another good cause. While Pandagon and Shakesville are busy group blogs, and Echidne, Majikthise and Feministe are not exactly single-voice blogs any more either, Feministing is going a step further – building a big community, you know, like a feminist version of DailyKos, with diaries and stuff. But that effort needs your help. You know what to do.
[‘Tis the giving season, part 1]

Hat-tip: Greg

And bloggers are really, really good at taking care of each other. So, this year, if you have some money to spare, help one of our own, Gary Farber, whose physical disability does not prevent him from writing an amazing blog (where you go to find out, for instance, exactly how, method-wise, the government spies on US citizens), but prevents him from getting a job that pays for food.

A milestone for Abel PharmBoy and Happy Birthday to Olduvai George!
Chris asks: how to get alienated kids from inner cities interested in nature?
This year saw a sharp rise in the number of multi-author scientific papers. This reflects the increasingly collaborative nature of science – no more crazy loners tinkering in their basements. Thus, a better system for assessing scientific contributions (at least as it pertains to publication of research) is becoming more urgent.
This Saturday is the World AIDS Day. Will you blog about it?
10 top researchers in the area of adolescent health, sexuality and behavior sent a letter to the Democratic leadership in the Senate, urging them to cut funding for abstinence-only education immediately. Why? Because it is dangerous.
Explore Our Dumb World! (hat-tip) Via Onion, which some people do not know is a satirical newspaper. But hey, some people have never heard of Leo Tolstoy either.
Is “intellectual property” really “intellectual monopoly“?
Verizon Wireless To Introduce ‘Any Apps, Any Device’ Option For Customers In 2008. Good. I am on Verizon. Will take a look once the details become public.
Elsevier’s 2collab science social network is now open to public. Deepak Singh, Wouter Gerritsma and Richard Akerman have the first reviews.
A new player in the Global Warming Denialism field – the typically dishonestly named Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change, which as its members boasts all the libertarian, Right Wing “think”-tanks that employ no real climate scientists, but instead an army of apologists for the pollution industry, including the nefarious John Locke Foundation (via) and the propaganda experts in the cookie-cutter mold of Frank Luntz, Carl Rove and Eric Dezenhall. Just look at their opening salvo, their first so-called report (pdf) – if you have been following the GW denialism lately you can instantly recognize all their carefully crafted Orwellian words, phrases and the entire denialists’ deck of cards.
The extreme right wing of the GOP is being purged by an even more extreme right wing of the GOP. Is there anyone normal left in that party at all, one wonders?

An article in Wired Campus (which I guess is a blog of the Chronicle of Higher Education) quotes something I wrote in this post about the Carnegie Mellon analysis of Top 100 most useful blogs. Thanks ae and Sandy for the heads-up.

Tetrapod Zoology
With all the media circus surrounding Nigersaurus, not enough publicity was given to another cool sauropod described on Thursday – the Xenoposeidon. It is quite amazing what a few years of painstaking study, comparative anatomy and head-scratching can do – reconstruct a large dinosaur from a single remnant: half a vertebra. My SciBling Darren Naish, co-author on the paper, describes it in great detail. I’ve been waiting for it for about a year or so, since Darren first mentioned it on his old blog in a four-part post about “Angloposeidon”. The other co-author, Mike Taylor, obviously adores the fossil bone!
The paper was published in the journal Palaeontology and the PDF of the article is freely available here. On the beautifully narrow-niche blog Sauropod Vertebra Picture of the Week, there are already four detailed posts about Xenoposeidon: one, two, three, four. Congratulations, Darren!
Stranger Fruit
My SciBling John Lynch was just awarded the CASE/Carnegie Professor of the Year award for Arizona. He got to go to D.C. and roam the hallways of Congress and then come back and tell us all about it. Congratulations, John!
Neurotopia
Evil Monkey is finally free! Congratulations, Evil!

Go now! Vote for Bad Astronomy!
Why? See what Tim and PZ say.

Go say Hello to Dave Bacon of Quantum Pontiff!

Go say Hello to Greg Laden, the latest acquisition by the ever-expanding Scienceblogs Empire.

Yes, Weblog Awards are up again. Not everyone’s favourite (as opposed to the Koufaxes), as they are easily freeped and one can find candidates who should not be there, i.e., blogs that have not written anything factual in years, e.g., right-wingers in political categories, pseudoscientists in science categories, medical quacks in medical categories, etc. So, the voting at Weblog Awards (which you can do daily) is more voting against than for in many categories. But there are certainly worthy finalists in many categories so it’s worth your time to try to remember to vote. Here are my personal picks – your mileage may vary.
Best Blog: Raw Story
Best Individual Blogger: Lindsay Beyerstein
Funniest Blog: Sadly, No!
Best Comic Strip: xkcd
Best Online Community: DailyKos (where are the scienceblogs?!)
Best Liberal Blog: they are all fantastic but I am alternating between Shakesville and Pandagon this time around.
Best Political Coverage: At Largely
Best LGBT Blog: Pam’s House Blend
Best Science Blog: Invasive Species Blog
Best Medical/Health Issues Blog: Respectful Insolence
Best Literature Blog: Pepys’ Diary
Best Video Blog: Crooks & Liars
Best European Blog (Non UK): European Tribune
Best Australia or New Zealand Blog: John Quiggin
Best of the Top 250 Blogs (they are still using the TTLB ecosystem?!): Bitch Ph.D.
Best of the Top 251 – 500 Blogs: Feministe
Best of the Top 501 – 1000 Blogs: The Sideshow
Best of the Top 1001 – 1750 Blogs: Echidne of the Snakes (although there are 3-4 other excellent blogs there)
Best of the Top 2501 – 3500 Blogs: Creek Running North
Best of the Top 3501 – 5000 Blogs: Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge
Best of the Top 6751 – 8750 Blogs: Abnormal Interests
Best of the Rest of the Blogs (8751+): Konagod
In other categories I don’t vote because I do not know any of the finalists, but you may, so take a look.

November is a National Novel Writing Month. Not all bloggers write novels, though, so some people proposed alternatives:
National Blog Writing Month (also known as National Blog Posting Month) and the International Dissertation Writing Month. The former is easy – post at least once a day throughout November (easy for me to say with my 8.2 posts per day average). The latter involves posting one’s thesis-writing (or manuscript-writing or grant-writing) progress on the blog.
Anyone interested? Follow the links and sign up.
And to get your juices flowing, there is yet another debate about cons and pros of academic blogging.

Mo the Neurophilosopher awarded me with a coveted prize – the Intellectual Blogger Award, bestowed to….

…those bloggers who demonstrate an inclination to think on their own. This is what I think is needed in today’s blogosphere. The term ‘Intellectual’ has often been derided in recent times, and this is one way to resurrect the true meaning: “An intellectual is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas.”

So, although this may be for the old stuff and the way my blog used to be much more intellectual in the past, here I proudly display the logo:

If you go to the origin of the award, you will see the rule as well as links to all the bloggers awarded so far. This is meant to reward people who use their blog to write creative stuff, e.g., not just filter and aggregate. I am a little miffed by the “no group blogs” rule, as this means nobody can give this award to brilliant people like Melissa, or Amanda, or Mark H, or Darksyde, who are easily differentiated from their (often equally brilliant) co-bloggers.
If you go to the front page of Scienceblogs.com and look down the left side-bar, you will see a list of 64 Intellectual Bloggers. They always make me think. Fortunately, and very early in the process, several of my Sciblings (Carl, Brian, Grrrrl, Shelley, Alex, Darren and Mo) already received the Award, as well as several other science bloggers outside of Sb who I like very much, so I am sure that it will quickly spread around the science blogosphere.
To this list, I will add the most uber-intellectual of the intellectual sciblings – Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science. That is my first offical ‘tag’.
Next, another blogger who often makes me think, then re-read a post for the second and third time – Chris Clarke of Creek Running North.
Then, the old and trusted source of intellectual joy, Lance Mannion.
The brilliant and original Lindsay Beyerstein of Majikthise.
And, to try to spread the award to the Nature Network bloggers, the Award goes to Henry Gee of The End Of The Pier Show.
You are tagged – go forth and give the Award to other intellectual bloggers!

As usual, some get it, some don’t:
Facebook-ing Philanthropy:

Social networks like Facebook that closely resemble users’ off-line social life could shake up philanthropy. Even if large organizations don’t immediately launch a cause on their own, any Facebook member can start one on its behalf. There have so far been 77 causes launched for UNICEF alone, raising some $11,000 for the fund. “We think it’s great that our friends and supporters have done this on their own on our behalf,” says spokeswoman Kristi Burnham.
More revolutionary still, social networks are creating a direct relationship between donor and cause through heightened transparency (on Facebook you can determine exactly where the money goes) and lower transaction costs (no mass-mailings for minor-league nonprofits, no prohibitively expensive fund-raising galas for small-fry donors). “I can see who made a donation and I can say ‘thank you’ on Facebook,” says Lindsey O’Neill, a development officer at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. “It really helps to foster that connected feeling.” And it also gives donors something to gloat about in front of all their friends.

Social graph-iti:

This suggests that the future of social networking will not be one big social graph but instead myriad small communities on the internet to replicate the millions that exist offline. No single company, therefore, can capture the social graph. Ning, a fast-growing company with offices directly across the street from Facebook in Palo Alto, is built around this idea. It lets users build their own social networks for each circle of friends.

Perspectives on the Microsoft-Facebook Partnership:

My take on the partnership? It’s been the same since I first wrote about it in 2006. Facebook is this generation’s identity archive, and any company with sophisticated data-mining tools can derive significant value from the data. Google’s entire infrastructure is set up around this type of data collection; Facebook just bought it for the steal of 240MM.

Facebook reveals the BBC as a liberal hotbed:

A survey of BBC employees with profiles on the site showed that 11 times more of them class themselves as “liberal” than “conservative”.

Facebook’s friend:

Microsoft’s bid may be explained in simpler terms, anyway. A high roller, once popular but now old news, has decided to spend his way back into the in-crowd. That could be an expensive process, but the alternative must have seemed worse: everyone “friending” Google.

The Early Adopter Effect:

Out of idle curiosity, I started running an ideological breakdown of Facebook users by age, starting at Facebook’s minimum age of 14 and working my way up. The spreadsheet is here so you can follow along.

Advertisers leap into Facebook:

ANY day soon, rumour has it, Apple, Coca-Cola, Condé Nast, General Motors, Nike and a host of other world-famous brand names will sign an advertising deal with the hottest company on the planet.

Microsoft makes Facebook a club you don’t want to join:

And what does Microsoft gets for its money? Officially, the chance to sell internet ads for Facebook outside the United States. Unofficially, the chance to spit in Google’s corporate eye.

That’s what Facebook’s for:

Since the unspoken ground rule of a Facebook friendship is that it is far from intimate, we’re collecting undemanding e-friends with abandon while striking off poor performers in real life.

Jim Buie asks:

I received a query from CBS News technology correspondent Daniel Sieberg about “the older generation” on Facebook. Do you have a story to share about your experiences on Facebook, particularly in relation to teens, many of whom call us over-40s “the creepies”? Or do you know teens or twenty-somethings willing to say how they feel about parents and geezers coming online and inspecting their Facebook profiles? CBS News will sort through the responses and may seek to interview some of the respondents. Post your responses at the link below:
http://www.togetherwhileapart.com

I have been on Facebook practically from the beginning as I am interested in social networks and the psychology and sociology of online behavior (and I have posted many times about it). During that time I went through three entire large sets of “friends”. The first were NCSU students – the set I used for this little study.
The second set were people with Yugoslav names – this showed me that the kids are OK! While their parents were killing each other over symbols, the kids, Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, Macedonians, etc., were friending each other, joining various Yugo-nostalgic groups (Balasevic is the best, Bijelo Dugmo is the best band ever, I miss chocolate bananas, etc.).
Now, most of my Facebook friends are bloggers, scientists, people I met at conferences, PLoS employees, etc. And since a couple of days ago – my wife! No more friending cute chicks any more 😉
This also means that I do not even see the “other Facebook”, i.e., what the current college students are doing and talking about. I have isolated myself inside the “new Facebook”, i.e., the bunch of us old “creepies”.

Apparently some computer geeks at Carnegie Mellon came up with a complicated mathematical formula to decide which blogs should one read to be most up to date, i.e., to quickly know about important stories that propagate over the blogosphere?
Bloggersblog comments.
OK, the fact that Don Surber is #2 is not too way off mark (surely in the top 100, if not exactly #2). Scienceblogs.com is in the 98th spot and should be way higher, I think.
But what is Instapudding doing in the Top Spot? If you want disinformation, sure. Likewise for Michelle Malkin, Captains Quarters and Powerline. And how useful it is to read a dead blog – my old blog ranked #3? How useful it is to rank blogs according to the 2006 data – that is eons ago in Internet time?
This must have been some fuzzy math. I hope the blogosphere responds with a big laugh.

If you go here:
http://getyourwebsitehere.com/jswb/text_to_ascii.html
and type in your email address, it will convert it to ASCII, thus making it harder for bots to pick up the address, while making it easier for readers to copy and paste without having to remove ‘AT’ and “DOT’. Hat-tip: Soni Pitts, my new Converger friend.

I know I’ve done it before, about a year ago, but meeting Roch at ConvergeSouth the other day reminded me that I should do this again – ask you to put up your blog for aggregation on We101.
The only piece of information you need to give is your blog URL and the city you are in (so if your anonymity requires that you do not want people to know where you live, this is not for you). The site aggregates blogs by location. It is all explained here.
For instance, there are, for now, only a few Chapel Hill bloggers on there and I would love to see more. The largest number so far is on the Greensboro site as this is the place where We101 was born. Note the ads by candidates for local elections there – a good place for such advertising.
This is a great way to find other blogs in your town. This is also a good way to find bloggers in other places. I would like to see We101 get so big that wherever I travel I can see who blogs in that city and so I can contact them and ask them if they would like to share a beer when I am visiting their hometowns.
So, see who is already there and then add your blog to the site.

Yes, I’ll try to be there in about an hour, if the system stops freezing on me, or if I do not get delayed by copulating with a furry kangaroo or something…
Bertalan is live-blogging the event!

Jonathan Eisen, Rosie Redfield and Douglas Theobald destroy the especially egregious example of bad media reporting on the “function of appendix” paper.
Kate does not dance around the issue when discussing a study on the relationship between lapdancers’ earnings and where they are in their monthly cycles.
Anne-Marie went into the caves and spent the day sexing bats
Did T.rex give us a finger? Two? Three?
The neurology of Alice in Wonderland – so cool!
In praise of yeast.
The Economy of Prestige (see: Nobel Prizes).
Math, Science and Art: Fibonacci Numbers, the Cochlea, and Poetry.
What is cryptozoology?
How to eat a cephalopod.
The coolest interactive Periodic Table ever!
Al Gore’s so-called ‘errors’.

A few days ago, I told you about this year’s $10,000 scholarship for student bloggers. A few days later, the voting has been vigorous (and the competition somewhat heated!), and Shelley is currently in second place. You can help her get to the top by voting for her if you have not done so already. And certainly go and check out her wonderful blog!

This is really suspicious – magic perhaps! Every time I make a wish (and whisper it in prayer to the, hushhhhh, super-secret gods of atheists) for a favourite blog to get invited to join Scienceblogs.com, that actually happens in a matter of a few days. Poof! Just like that. Just look at today – Brian Switek just moved his lovely Laelaps blog from the old site to the new place right here.
Dinosaurs. Lots of dinosaurs! And much other good stuff – evolution, history of science, book reviews, cool animals… He’ll move his old legendary posts over to the new place gradually over time, so you should check the archives of his old site to get a glimpse, but for now, go to the new place and say Hello!

You may remember last year’s contest, when my SciBling Shelley Batts was a Runner-up for the big prize.
The finalists for this year’s $10,000 scholarship have just been announced and Shelley is one of the finalists again. Hopefully, this year she’ll win.
And you can help her by voting for her.

Chris Clarke explains eloquently what is, essentially, my blog commenting policy (though I transgress on other people’s blogs…sorry).
The Senate vote on the mandatory free access to NIH-funded research has been postponed, which gives you all a few more days to do your part!
John Dupuis interviews Richard Akerman. I met Richard at Scifoo, and John is coming to SBC. Both are science bloggers interested in new technologies and how they impact science libraries, so the interview is quite enlightening.
Dicyemida: Leading a double life – an invertebrate you probably never heard of, but if you love Cephalopods you should get worried….
Friday Ark #159 is up on The Modulator and Steve has picthed the Animeme to just the right audience for it. More and more posts are sprouting around the Web responding to the meme.
How to use Facebook as part of your business strategy – an excellent article by Steve Outing.
Waaay coool: Eigenfactor: Ranking and mapping scientific knowledge
Medical Student Bloggers, Best Medical Blogs and another list of Best Medical Blogs.
Evo-devo of mammalian molars – PZ Myers in his finest science blogging style (but read the preamble first).
Council of Europe accepts resolution opposing the teaching of creationism as a scientific discipline – read PvM and Archy.
Development of assymetry in the nervous system.
Spandrels: here, here and here.
RPM of evolgen is posting original, previously unpublished data on his blog. See the entire series (so far) here, here, here, here, here and here.

I regularly check Anton Zuiker’s Sugarcubes, displayed in his sidebar. There, I recently discovered that Ethan Zuckerman and Bruno Giussani put together a booklet that explains how to liveblog a conference – Tips for conference bloggers (choose between a large PDF and a small PDF). Pretty good information overall.
When I went to the first BloggerCon in Chapel Hill, I was still a newbie: I sat next to and chatted with Dave Winer without knowing who he was. I do not remember now, but I believe I wrote a brief post about the BloggerCon afterwards.
The following year, at Podcastercon, I sat back and enjoyed myself, and only felt compelled to, afterwards at home, write a post that was mostly about Dave Warlick’s amazing session on podcasting in the classroom. That was the first time many of us have seen The Wizard in action (he usually travels around the country doing this), but that experience was instrumental in our seeking out early and getting Dave to lead a session on the use of the Web and the concept of the Flat Classroom in science education for the Science Blogging Conference.
At last year’s ConvergeSouth, which was only one day long, I wrote only a one-post summary, but the year before, I wrote a whole lot of posts, session-by-session (the last post in the series has links to all the others on the bottom). But that was not liveblogging – I wrote all those posts over about ten days after I got home from the conference. From memory! I did not even take any notes!
Blogging from Scifoo was closer to real-time than is my usual practice (well, that was the first time I actually had a laptop, and I had it with me!), but even that was not real liveblogging. In the sessions, I want to pay attention and to interact with others. If I am crafting a sentence to write about what I just heard, I will miss the next ten sentences and loose the thread. I’d rather digest the entire session in my mind and write about it afterwards.
As an organizer, I do not have time to liveblog the Science Blogging Conference as I have to be at so many different places at the same time, making sure everything is going smoothly. But last year, a number of people did a great job liveblogging and post-blogging the conference. So I hope that there will be good blogging from the next one as well. Perhaps the Zuckerman-Giussani handbook will be helpful for the livebloggers here in January.

Back in March or early April, I was interviewed for an article on Science Blogging for BlueSci, the Cambridge University’s popular science magazine, produced by students there. The issue is now out and the article by Mica Tatalovic based on that interview is very good. You should read the entire issue, of course (I liked the review of the current knowledge of kisspeptin, for instance), but if you want to read the Science Blogging article, you will have to scroll down to pages 30 and 31 of the PDF. Enjoy the cartoons drawn for the article as well – we may have to use this one for advertising the Science Blogging Conference, methinks:

You did it! Earlier today, somebody on Scienceblogs.com posted the 500,000th comment. It will take a few days for our Seed Overlords to check the counter, contact the winners and make the big announcement. In the meantime, as PZ says, You are encouraged to go on commenting to run the tally up to a million.
And, you can enjoy a randomly rotating selection of cool comments on the Scienceblogs.com front page. I know, I know, nobody ever asked me to fertilize their eggs (not that Mrs.Coturnix would approve), but one of the rotating comments is the historical one here:

PLoS is quite proud of it – you can see this screenshot was already posted in the photo album of the PLoS Facebook group.