I know you’ve all been waiting for this. Well, after two all-nighters, the deed is done. Under the fold is the final list of 50 posts that will be included in the anthology. There may be some small changes if some of the authors refuse (or never get back to me in the first place), but I have a couple of posts in reserve for such eventualities.
This was a heck of a job (and I hope I did better than Brownie…) to do. All science bloggers are my friends, and all the submitted posts were excellent. Cutting down from 218 down to 50 was a heart-wrenching, blood-sweat-and-tears kind of a job (like hosting a Tangled Bank of all Tangled Banks!). Fortunately, I got by with a little help from my friends. It felt like watching your best buddies being voted off the island, but the Council has spoken! Janet, Karmen, Jennifer, Jenna, John, Bill, MC, Carl, Leo, Heinrich, John and one anonymous reviewer sent in their evaluations of all the entries and that was hugely helpful. So, thank you, guys, very much!!!!!
All 50 authors have been notified and I got nine formatted articles back to me already (guess whose came in first?) and several others promised to do so by the end of the day today. I am still waiting for some others.
Three people (me included), completely independently from each other, had the idea to place a big chunk from my “Blogging and the Future of Science” post into the Preface which then left my other entries for consideration (and so many people liked the “Everything you wanted to know about sleep…” – I promise I did not ram it in myself under my editorial powers – as one reviewer put it: “OK: I’m going to leave this up to you. If you want to include a *different* post, be my guest. But this is the post that was BoingBoinged, the one that made a big splash, the one that probably motivated a bunch of people to start science-blogging. Just sayin’.”). Also, no poem made it into the Top 50 so I may include one in the Preface as well (that is sneaking two additional posts in – what a trick!).
I also recevied some fantastic cover art from a couple of people. It will be tough to decide which one to use. I wish I had time to make that choice democratically by asking you to choose – but the time is too short – I’ll have to decide, like, today, so the blook will be ready to go by the end of this week and up for sale by the end of the next week, just in time for the Conference.
Once all the editing, formatting and Preface-writing is done and Lulu.com takes over the job, I’ll sit down and make the book webpage. From one of the pages there I will link to all 218 submitted posts – they are good! I will let you know here as soon as the book is available for sale (I dont think I’ll be getting ANY money from this project – we’ll mark it “at cost” and use the proceeds towards the next year’s edition) – perhaps place it on the side-bar for everyone to see. And if you feel strongly that I should see some financial gain from this project, do it the bloggy way – hit my PayPal or Amazon buttons or the Amazon.com wish list (and a link is worth its weight in gold).
Also, start thinking about the next year. Check out all the science-related carnivals regularly, bookmark the best posts and keep them until next December until the nomination process starts again for the 2007 edition. I am not sure if there will be a new editor (volunteers?) or if I’ll be doing this again next year (hey, nobody complains that Gardner Dozois has been compiling SF anthologies for decades), but keep that in mind.
Now, to the finalists, in no particular order (and certainly not in order in which they will appear in the book itself):
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