Category Archives: Blogging

If you decide to post about the 2007 Triangle Science Blogging Conference please tag your posts with this Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference

…are you a citizen journalist or just a blogger?
Depending on one’s definition of “journalist”, I guess.
Is a professional (i.e., someone paid by a news organization) who publishes in newspapers a journalist no matter what s/he is writing, i.e., publishing just anything: ads, horoscopes, comics, crosswords, Ask Sadie, op-eds, etc? If so, bloggers are journalists.
If the word is restricted to a person who uncovers new information and writes articles for the news pages only, than most of us (but not all) are NOT journalists.

If so, do you care, and if you do, what can you do to stop them?
Open Switch, Billy the Blogging Poet and Robert Scoble and their commenters chime in on Internet copyright, Creative Commons and splogs.

You can help spread the word about the 2007 Triangle Science Blogging Conference by using this logo:

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or by downloading and printing out this flyer and posting it on a bulletin board or outside your office.
Technorati Tag: sciencebloggingconference

So, now that you have a better idea how great it was last year, are you coming to ConvergeSouth this year? On October 14th (yup, one day instead of two). Last year was about journalism and blogging. This year, the theme is “beyond blogging”, both technologically (podcasting, vlogging) and socially (building communities, etc.). I am especially interested in the Facebook session (you may have heard already that Facebook opened its doors to non-“edu” e-mail addresses today) and hope that there will be a lot of young users of Facebook there telling us how they think about it instead of us old fogies telling them how to use it.

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What’s a bloggercon without a discussion of traffic and how to raise it…

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I see this session as the seed for this year’s theme of ConvergeSouth.

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This sessions tried, once again, to answer the old question “Where are the female political bloggers?”

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When you go to bloggercons, you bump into famous bloggers…

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This was one of the best sessions from last year. As always, you can click on the spider-clock icon to check the comments on the original post….

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This post has actually been linked and cited quite a bit by people starting new blog carnivals, as it explains what those things are…

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Sure, this year they are not paying for my trip, but last year was fun for many other reasons…

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I understand that this year’s ConvergeSouth will be different in theme and format from last year’s, but that does not mean it is not going to be full of interesting people and conversations…

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Hey, it was fun last year, I bet it will be fun this year, on October 14th…

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ConvergeSouth06 is on October 14th. So, in anticipation of the event, I will repost, in rapid succession, my coverage of the last year’s ConvergeSouth (October 7-8, 2005). Perhaps this will whet your appetite and you’ll decide to register (for free) and show up this year. Here is the first of eleven posts…

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Daniel Collins of Down To Earth blog, did a little research on the power law as it applies to the recent and current standing of various (mostly science) blogs, with some interesting obervations about the edge effects, the gradual lowering of the slope, and the slow move of the cut-off point towards the right.

The main points:
– science blogosphere is still young, growing and developing.
– the power-law works only for the high-ranked blogs, i.e., the “B/C-list”, and breaks down for superpopular blogs as well as low-ranked blogs.
– we play the Red Queen game, i.e., each one of us needs to grow in the number of incoming links just to retain the same ranking.
One thing that may be a problem for his analysis is the difficulty of Technorati in dealing with Seed ScienceBlogs (many of the blogs Daniel analysed are from Seed). For instance, my blog’s ranking has not been updated by Technorati in 100 days. I am certain that my ranking is much higher now than it was at the time I have just moved to Seed. I have contacted them about this but nothing got fixed so I gave up. I don’t really care, but the problem can screw up mathematical analyses like the one Daniel performed, especially as it appears my blog is not the only one with this problem.
Also, when the Nature Top 50 list was formed, that was a time when a bunch of blogs have just moved to Seed. Thus, what they used was the Technorati rankings of the old sites as the new sites did not have a ranking yet. For me, they chose the ranking of Circadiana, which put me at the 20th place. If they used the ranking of Science And Politics, I would have been 5th. If they used the rankings of The Magic School Bus, I would have been 46th. I do not know if Daniel used the rankings cited in that Nature list for his initial rankings calculations.
As I am not posting on my old blogs any more, and people are gradually moving their links from the old sites to the new one, the rankings of all three blogs are gradually slipping back. Science And Politics was ranked around 1490th about six moinths ago and is 6035th today. A Blog Around The Clock is ranked 7458th today, as it was 100 days ago when it was last updated.

In light of the recent outburst of blogging about diversity provoked by the all-white meeting of bloggers with Bill Clinton, it is interesting to take a look at Simon Owen’s new informal survey of the diversity in various bligging niches. Go take a look and let Simon know what you think. Also, compare his findings with the last three years of Blogads surveys which do not explicitely ask for “race”, but have additional interesting questions (each year had different questions, though, so check all three). Also, see what Dave says about the survey.

Sorry for scarce posting Monday – I hope you liked that long re-post from 11am, long enough to be sufficient reading for one day.
Anton has posted the summary of the Blogger MeetUp. I really like to have this kind of semi-structured meetup once a month. I was impressed by wiki.com – it is simple enough for a compidiot like me to set up and use. And Lyceum, whle still being developed, looks like a promising platform for a classroom multi-blogging use.
Then, I went to Top Of The Hill and had a couple of beers with my fellow ScienceBloggers Orac and Abel. That was fun – I have not met Orac in person before although we have been reading each other for almost two years. It is always cool to meet blogfriends in real life.

From Ed Cone, via Steve Rubel, through Shel Israel, we find that Charlene Li published a new study of blog use and discovered that a quarter of Generation Y reads blogs, which is twice as much as Generation X and three times as much as Boomers (which generation was Generation F and, once the Generation Z of my kids grows up, will there be another generation after them at all, or do we start using the Greek alphabet instead?).
MySpace is for highschoolers. Facebook is for college students (who tolerate, for now, a small number of highschoolers, grad students, faculty and staff, but may leave in a stampedo if/when Facebook lets non-“edu” addresses in). So, what kinds of blogs do they read/write? Were MySpace blogs, Facebook Notes, MSNSpaces, AOLblogs, Xanga and LiveJournals counted in the study?
Joe McCarthy takes a long hard look at a whole series of polls and studies on blog use by various age groups.
Out of millions of Gen-Y-ers reading and writing blogs, I hope at least some cover science-related topics sometimes, or come to ScienceBlogs to interact with us. How many of my readers are Gen Y?

Eva of Easternblot has written an article about science blogging that is very good.
In the article, she interviews Tara Smith, PZ Myers, the Trio Fantasticus of the Inkycircus, Carl Zimmer and Oliver Morton.
The article appears in the latest issue of Hypothesis Journal and you can download the article here (pdf)
At the bottom, there is a short list of other interesting science blogs and one of the titles looks vaguely familiar…

S through W – now on Page 3.14

I hope you can come to ConvergeSouth06. If you are interested in the Facebook session and if you have access to Facebook, join the Group Facebook at ConvergeSouth06.
Technorati Tag: ConvergeSouth

Why nobody told me that Massimo Pigliucci has a blog? And an excellent blog to boot!

Facebook opening up to the masses:

Social networking site Facebook is to ditch its requirement that users must have a university email address, according to media reports.
Facebook required members to have a school or university email address, but added 1,000 approved work addresses in May allowing students that had graduated to continue to access the site.
Removing the need for approved email addresses will put the site in direct competition with other social networks such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster.

My prediction – disaster. It will not just compete against MySpace, it will become MySpace without bells and whistles. What are people on Facebook doing these days (and I can see that via News Feed)? Removing all but the most basic information from their profiles. And that is in order to prev ent their “friends” to see what they are doing. With opening to non-college users, people will be deleting their profiles altogether.

The Periodic Table of ScienceBlogs continues.

Here is the next group of scibloggers to learn about.

ConvergeSouth is not a blogging conference – it is about the stuff that goes beyond blogging, both in terms of technology (podcasting, vlogging) and in terms of use – building online communities, for instance.
I am really happy to see that there will be a session on Facebook this year and I hope that students from NC A&T and UNC-G show up and tell us old geezers exactly what Facebook is to them, how they use it, how they think about it, and what else they need.
So far, we keep guessing as to what the next generation needs and wants, but they grew up online while we learned later in life. We have a different set fo experiences and a different mindset. We need, for once, to sit down and listen. And take notes.
I hope Fred will come to this. And danah boyd
Technorati Tag: ConvergeSouth

This is what you see when you log in to Facebook today:

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:
We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.
When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.
We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.
Somehow we missed this point with News Feed and Mini-Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.
This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.
About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Today (Friday, 9/8) at 4pm edt, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.
Thanks for taking the time to read this,
Mark

Edit: Dave Winer explains exactly what happened and why. I like the metaphor he used.

TNG of Neural Gourmet tagged me with this meme, so how can I resist….

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When Ed announced that Elizabeth Edwards is coming to ConvergeSouth to lead a session about buidling online communities, a bunch of Republican commenters on his blog announced they are not going to show up because of her and found it hard (some, not all of them) to be persuaded that the conference is apolitical and that Elizabeth Edwards has more than one aspect to her – she is not just a Democrat, she is also a mother, a cancer survivor, a book author, a wife of a famous person, and an early adopter of online technology.
In the end, Elizabeth herself showed up in the comments and explained why she is coming and what she is going to talk about. I am looking forward to her session and the conference as a whole. If it is anything like last year, it really is apolitical. To this day I do not know the political sympathies of half the people I met there and had a grand time with. It’s about blogging and journalism, not politics.
Technorati Tag: ConvergeSouth

…and it is not inert gasses. Check the 6th bunch of my SciBlings

Since I do have a Facebook account and get updates, as I am interested in social software and how it is used by the next generation (including our students), I’ve been following this over the past couple of days: Inside the Backlash Against Facebook. People are furious with the new intrusive NewsFeed that tells you, minute by minute, every time one of your ‘friends’ sneezes (or worse). It cannot be switched off. Also, their Note blogging platform does not work – it updates every day or two instead of immediately and has no RSS Feed (well, the Facebook editors’ blog also has no feed, go figure!). What do you think?
More info:
Blogosphere Reacts to Facebook Feeds
Facebook Subscribers Protest Site’s News Feeds
Digg: Facebook Redesign Angers Students Over Invaded Privacy
Facebook Faces Backlash
New Facebook Redesign More Than Aesthetic
Facebook Redesign Angers Students Over Invaded Privacy
Facebook loses face over force-fed updates
A Day Without Facebook
Wikipedia: Facebook
Facebook backlash

Here is a cool microbiology blog, if you can read Slovenian language (I can get the main idea of the post, but not understand every word). This blog is about science in general and this one is about food science.