Category Archives: Blogging

Have you been reading The Rude Pundit lately. He’s got a fantastic line-up of guestbloggers, all female, and all rejoicing in the opportunity to be as rude possible. The latest today, It’s all about sex by Pam. Read them all.

David Dobbs is an accomplished science journalist and writer. I am sure you will enjoy reading hs new blog, right here on SEED scienceblogs – Smooth Pebbles!
So, go say Hi! He’s already moved the archives from his old blog to the new place so there’s plenty of good stuff to read already.

KIm, the nursing goddess of Emergiblog. Go say Hi!

Wow! In just a couple of days, SEED scienceblogs.com moved up from #100 to #78 on Technorati Most Favourited list. While the numbers are still small it is easy to game the system, but in the long run, the most popular blogs will emerge on top. If you click on this and make SB one of your favourites – and just one more person is enough for this – we’ll overtake PowerLine!
Update: You did it! Thank you! Now on to greater hights, to reach Wonkette and Pharyngula and BoingBoing!

In 50 days of its existence, this blog has received 636 comments. The SEED sciencebloggers already promote each other a lot, so I want to give a shout-out to my most regular commenters who are NOT themselves SB bloggers or SEED staff (or myself – after all I posted the most comments while responding to others). I happily include people who I disagree with here – spam and trolling has been deleted long ago and is not counted in the totals.
Plus, at some point in the future (perhaps on December 31st), I will do this again and the person with the greatest number of comments will get to choose the topic of my subsequent post!
Here are the current leaders of the pack:
greensmile 18
Bill Hooker 14
tng 11
Dendroica 10
CFeagans 9
Peter Wilson, PhD 9
etbnc 8
Deep Thought 8
John McKay 6
theRidger 6
Jenna 6
Tulse 6
Elayne Riggs 5
Brandon 5
Kristjan Wager 4
nbm 4
scout 4
Kevin 4
…as well as a number of people with three comments (cross the magic barrier and I’ll include the link next time!)…:
Carel 3
Phil Plait 3
Left_Wing_Fox 3
Julie Stahlhut 3
Jane Shevtsov 3
Madison Guy 3
Hsien Lei 3
Erin Monahan 3
J-Dog 3
Karl 3
Dave S. 3
David Boxenhorn 3
Craig Pennington 3
wheatdogg 3
Babe in the Universe 3
Paul Decelles 3
JacquiG 3
Coffee Mug 3
…and many with 2 or 1…

Here is the forth and final part of the introduction to SEED sciencebloggers. Check out the first part, the second part and the third part if you have missed them before. There ain’t no eleven left, so today we have only ten (but I hear there will be a couple more soon….):

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Here is the third part of the introduction to SEED sciencebloggers, the next eleven (check out the first part and the second part if you have missed them before) of my SiBlings:

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Here is the second part of the introduction to SEED sciencebloggers, the next eleven (check out the first part if you have missed it yesterday). I hope you like them and appreciate the breadth and depth of writing here (so, yes, if you have a blog, and you are registered with Technorati – which if you have a blog you should be – please make scienceblogs.com, as well as any or all individual blogs here that you may like, one of your favourites)

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Since my move here to SEED scienceblogs, I made a mistake of assuming, quite wrongly, that most of my visitors are aslo science bloggers (or people interested in science) who, almost by definition, regularly read all of the other SEED sciencebloggers as well.
I forgot that some of the readers are not new readers, but people who came over here with me, people who have read one of my three old blogs for a long time before my move.
They may be liberal/progressive bloggers, or fans of John Edwards, or North Carolina bloggers, or Balkans bloggers, or edubloggers or academic bloggers. Not to mention skeptics and atheists. And many more…
So, I am really remiss at linking to interesting stuff posted by my fellow SEED sciencebloggers (aka SiBlings). I’ll try to remedy that by doing a link-fest every now and then, starting right now. But before I start, let me introduce you to the SEED scienceblogs as a concept first.
It is a project by the Seed Media Group that publishes SEED magazine. You can see the links to the most interesting science news (the Daily Zeitgeist) and SEED articles at the very bottom of the page of each blog.
They are hosting 44 (and more to come) science blogs on their website. We get a tiny little bit of money every month (plus technical support) and they do not in any way interfere with the style and content of our blogging. You can read more about the whole concept at the About SB page (linked to from every individual blog on the top right corner). You can susbcribe to any one individual blog, or to a collective SB feed if you go to this page.
If you got to the SB front page you will see a bunch of different things there:
There is a strip showcasing the most recent blog posts.
There is a big quote on the right from one of the bloggers, changed every day.
There are lists of most e-mailed and most active blog posts, and most popular and most recent searches.
You can narrow down your experience by chossing one of the ten channels, so if you are interested only in physics, or politics, or medicine, or brain & behavior, you can safely ignore the rest. On the bottom of the page you will see the last three posts in each Channel, and on the top left margin you can click and find the aggregator for each channel.
On the bottom of the left margin you will find the links to all the individual blogs.
Right up on top in the middle is The Buzz – showing last five posts that contain a particular word (or group of words). This also changes every day.
On the bottom right you will find a link to the latest post on the SB Editor’s blog Page 3.14 and the aggregated responses to the weekly AskTheScienceBloggers question. Page 3.14 is a great starting point (a “base”) for your daily visits to the site. They link to the most interesting posts of the day (Quick Picks), interesting news and the ATSB questions and answers. They highlight our Friday fun blogging themes, and provide information if there are planned changes to the site (e.g, introducing newly added blogs, and 3-4 of those are coming very soon). Go say Hello and post suggestions (and praise) in the comments.
On top of every page of SEED empire, you will see a narrow grey strip. It shows a couple of links to the most interesting blog-posts and SEED articles of the day. This strip is hosted on a different system than the rest of the site, so if something happens and the site is down, you will still be able to see the grey strip and find the relevant information on it.
The best way for the “regulars” to check out the SB blogs is by checking the Last 24 Hours page, which is the complete aggregator of all the recent blog posts from all the SEED blogs. You can also subscribe to e-mail notifications to any individual blog or to all of them.
Yesterday, Technorati turned three and launched a new look and some new toys. The SEED scienceblogs is regarded by Technorati as a single blog, although each individual blog is also separately ranked. Right now, SB is up on #32 [update – #31] on the Top 100 Most Popular list, overtaking Cute Overload just yesterday. You can help us move up by linking both to our individual blogs and to SB homepage from your blogrolls and occasional blogposts.
We have not cracked the Top 100 Most Favourited list yet [update – we did at #100]. You can help us do that by choosing any individual blogs (e.g., mine) – plus the SB blogs as a whole – as your “favourites”. Just click on the links I placed on my left margin to do so.
Let me now introduce you to some of my SiBlings, but not all of them at once, lest you get overwhelmed and run away. Instead, I will split this into chewable chunks, i.e., into four posts, published over the next four days, each introducing eleven (or so) blogs. I have already introduced Page 3.14 above, so today, you get only ten (and I am excluding myself asuming that you already know me if you are reading this)….(under the fold)

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My son’s birthday is next week. He wants (and we agree) a laptop. He is, surprisingly for a man of his brilliance, a PC guy. Good graphics and sound are very important for the stuff he does (making Flash movies, gaming, etc).
What should we get him? You know we are dirt poor, so steer away from $1200 Dells….(and no, I do not have enough parental power to persuade him that Mac is the real thing).

Inspired by RPM of Evolgen, I ask, how many people in your school/University, or town, or state, are blogging, especially about science?
First, I don’t know of anyone from my University who blog privately, though you can probably search the MSNBlogs etc. for schools and locales. But, folks at North Carolina State University started, just a few months ago, their own blogging service, called WolfBlogs, using Webroller as the platform. There are still not that many blogs there, most are still trying to figure out how to do this thing, but a few have taken off nicely, and a couple are science-related:
Science! is written by the Physical and Mathematical Sciences reference librarian at D.H.Hill library.
Physical and Engineering Science News is written by the Physical and Engineering Sciences reference librarian at D.H.Hill library.
Aedes Egypti and Fred Gould are blogs by the students and the PI respectively in the Entomology (ecology and evolution) lab of Dr.Fred Gould.
Cell Lab appears like an aborted experiment, but may restart after the summer is over. There are also some course-blogs there, as well as a nice political blog Fully Myelinated.
As for the town (Chapel Hill), the area (Triangle), and the state (North Carolina) this is a thriving bloging community with many good bloggers. You can see a partial list and the aggregator on NCblogs.com, or follow the Tar Heel Tavern carnival, or check out various blogging activities at BlogTogether.
Out of all those many blogs, some are about science. You are reading one of those as we speak. Here on SEED’s scienceblogs, there are a few more North Carolinians: Abel PharmBoy of Terra Sigillata, Dave and Great Munger of Cognitive Daily and James Hrynyshyn of Island Of Doubt.
Reed Cartwright has just moved to Raleigh (and NCSU). His blog De Rerum Natura is, thus, a local blog now. Reed is also one of the founders/contributors of Panda’s Thumb.
Rob Gluck writes a very narrowly focused blog – Ivory-bills Live.
Russ Williams, The Director of the NC Zoo in Asheboro, keeps a great blog at Russlings.
SwampStuff and SwampThings are blogs by a nature watcher and nature photographer from northeastern North Carolina.
Any others that you know of? How about your school, town or state?

Top secret blogger for CIA fired, shut down:

Christine Axsmith, a software contractor for the CIA, considered her blog a success within the select circle of people who could actually see it.
Only people with top secret security clearances could read her musings, which were posted on Intelink, the intelligence community’s classified intranet. Writing as Covert Communications, CC for short, she opined in her online journal on such national security conundrums as stagflation, the war of ideas in the Middle East and — in her most popular post — bad food in the CIA cafeteria.
But the hundreds of blog readers who responded to her irreverent entries with titles such as “Morale Equals Food” won’t be joining her again.
On July 13, after she posted her views on torture and the Geneva Conventions, her blog was taken down and her security badge was revoked. On Monday, Axsmith was terminated by her employer, BAE Systems, which was helping the CIA test software.
As a traveler in the classified blogosphere, Axsmith was not alone. Hundreds of blog posts appear on Intelink. The CIA says blogs and other electronic tools are used by people working on the same issue to exchange information and ideas.

Read the rest…
Well, I am not sure about this. Blogs are software. A blogging platform is just a tool. It can be used for very different purposes.
If her blog was supposed to be for work, she should have blogged her personal life and opinions elsewhere, on an anonymous Blogspot or something. I can see why CIA shut her down and I doubt she has a case if she sues.

Technorati treats each of SEED blogs as anindividual entity but also the whole scienceblogs.com site as a single blog. Over the past week or so, the SB gradually moved up from #51 to #32 on the Top 100 Most Popular Blogs list. More you link to each one of us, or the site as a whole, higher up we’ll get. Do you think we can overtake at least Michelle Malkin? At least we write empirically correct blogposts….

Owner of the very popular French blog, La Petite Anglaise got Dooced:

She kept her popular blog anonymous, never revealing her full name or workplace. But despite her attempts at secrecy, her employer found out and fired her — unusual in labor-protected France, where workers have strong legal protections.

It does not matter that nobody has any idea what he name of the company is or even in what city it is located. If you blog, you are automatically suspect and can be fired. We’ll see what the French courts think about this. Liberte, ….
On the same day, in the same newspaper, David Broder had to take a dig at bloggers as well:

“Frank began by separating himself from the strident voices on the left — frequent in the world of blogging — that accuse Bush of subverting American democracy. “Some of the words that get thrown around, authoritarianism and worse, should not be used lightly,” Frank said. “This remains, in the sixth year of the Bush presidency, a very free country.”

“Very free country” compared to what? The Iraqi “democracy”? And then Broder goes on to list a bunch of instances of …..BushCo authoritarianism! But bloggers are just hordes of wild-eyed barbarians. We’ll see what he says when the White House finds something in Broder’s writing they do not like and turn against him. Will he then think we’re so free. It is easy to be deluded while schmoozing with the politicos at cocktail parties…

Anton has announced a brief summer break in MeetUps (I doubt I’ll make it to the last one before then) followed by an ambitious Fall: a Triangle Bloggers barbecue in August, a science blogging workshop, a parent blogging workshop, a storyblogging event, and bloggers meeting with John Edwards. Of course, we’ll also all go over to Greensboro for the next ConvergeSouth bloggercon.
If you want to be involved in one or another of these events, please contact Anton and he’ll put you to work!

Attention span:

With a daily newspaper, there is a tacit understanding: That day’s paper is the latest news; yesterday’s paper becomes old news — recycling-bin fodder, fishwrap, bird-cage liner, art-project makings, whatever.
————snip———–
The Internet is a 24/7 environment, where everything is happening all the time, right now. That’s because it’s a hive-mind of people spread across the planet, and something’s always happening somewhere. Sinatra wanted to wake up in a city that never sleeps; the Internet is the digital-world equivalent of New York City — only with a population in the billions.
How, then, does one tell when news goes from “new” to “old” when the Internet is in a state of eternal “now”? Well, one does a study, of course, to make that determination. The results are interesting, and, frankly, encouraging to us hidebound, green-visored, blue-pen-toting purveyors of paper and ink (in addition to our online offering at http://www.ldnews.com, come visit anytime.)
In the June issue of Physical Review E, the journal of the American Physical Society, Albert-László Barabási of the University of Notre Dame, reported that the half-life of the average news article on the Internet is 36 hours. That means, in an article’s first 36 hours of accessibility online, half of those who will seek it out have done so. Others come along later for research projects, by happenstance, for historical review or for any other reason one happens to look at a give Web page.

They are comparing apples and oranges. 36 hours may be Internet news half-life span. But 24-hours is MSM whole-life span.
Thus, a piece of news in today’s newspaper expires within 24 hours. That’s it. Kaputt.
But on the Internet, a piece of news has a 36-hour long “head” and who-knows-how-long tail. Just like you can have Long Tail concept applied to merchandise, space, or news sources, you can also apply it to time.
So, if a piece of news appears online (let’s presume on an MSM page), it takes about 36 hours for half of the audience of that page to read the news. But, if the news is important or exciting, once big-hitters (e.g., A-listers) in the blogosphere take it and run with it, they have their own 36 hours in addition to the original 36 (though there is likely to be some overlap).
Then, it percolates through the smaller and smaller blogs, each having its own 36-hour half-life span. Not to mention that frequently-updated blogs may have a shorter half-life span for any individual item than those who blog once a day or less.
If the news are really important, bloggers have shown that the news can be consciously kept alive for many days, even weeks at a time, through blogsawrms and the like, often until MSM is forced to take up the story again (or for the first time) and/or until there is a resolution (e.g,. a bill passes in the House or something ).
Thus, it is silly to talk about “half-life” on the Internet. Each piece of news gets as mcuh time as people think it deserves. Unlike in MSM, when every piece of news dies at midnight.

Reed Cartwright, the blogger of De Rerum Natura and Panda’s Thumb fame, has moved to my neighborhood (OK, 28.7 miles from me), getting ready to start his postdoc at NCSU. A loss for Georgia is a gain for North Carolina. I hope he enjoys the vibrant local blogging community.

Fred Stutzman just posted his latest data on the use of Facebook, this time comparing the incoming college freshmen of Summer 2006 to Summer 2005.
Quick notes:
– more people enter college with already existing Facebook accounts
– less people announce their political affiliation
– people have more out-of-network friends
Fred notes some possible explanations for these trends. I posted my quick thoughts in the comments on his post.
You can find my quick analysis of Facebook here and all of Fred’s posts related to his Facebook research here.
In related news, Danah Boyd posts about the latest study on MySpace, particularly the question of denger from online stalkers. Larry Rosen, the author of the study, shows up in the comments and explains some more….

Anton notes that Dave Winer is advising John Edwards to start a program to teach North Carolinians to blog.
Er, Dave, you’ve been here several times at various bloggercons. And the bloggercons were here because this is one of the Big Centers of blogging in the country. Why should John Edwards start doing something that is already done by people who know what to do and how to go about it and are successful at it as humanely possible?
John Edwards is using the new communications technologies better than any politician – he is light years ahead of the competition. He sits in the hotebed of blogging. Why should he teach blogging? Let him do politics and we’ll make sure that it spreads through the wires and wireless to online North Carolinians and others.
Update: Ed and Russell chime in.

Journal Nature has published a short article about science blogging. You do not need a subscription to read it – you can find it here.
In it, they highlight Top 5 science blogs according to Technorati rankings. Those five are, quite deservingly, Pharyngula, Panda’s Thumb, Real Climate, Cosmic Variance and Scientific Activist. Interestingly, three of the top five are group blogs, and all five delve, either partically or entirely, on various religiously and politically motivated attacks on science. I guess this is what sells better than pure science commentary, for good reasons, and the blogs covering a greater variety of topics understandably draw greater crowds.
They also posted a list of Top 50, which you can find here. They say that 22 our of those 50 are SEED sciencebloggers.
They had a somewhat strange criterion for inclusion on the list, based on a somewhat dubious definiton of a “working scientist”. Thus, some of the best blogs that are most certainlly ‘science blogs’ are either not on the list, or relegated to an additional list of blogs by writers who write about science, where you can find Carl Zimmer and Phil Plait among others.
PZ, Alex, Tara and John Lynch have already posted their commentary on the Nature’s list.
I was happy to see myself on the list, on the 20th spot. Apparently, they used the Technorati rankings of Circadiana (14,920) to determine this, although they linked to this blog. My blog would have moved somewhat up or down the list if they chose instead to go with the rankings of Science And Politics (3,229), A Blog Around The Clock (15,456), or The Magic School Bus (35,258).
I have on my Bloglines currently more than 450 science or science-related blogs. I used to make big link-fests covering the science blogosphere. If you check out the last such linkfest it also links back to all the previous editions. Perhaps I should do another one soon. All the spotlight is on the SuperPopular blogs. I’d like you to explore some less-well-known yet excellent other science blogs, so check out those old linkfests.
Update: Josh, Mike, Hsien, Mark, Chad, Nick, Ana, Nuthatch, Frank, Osame, Jeremy, Monado, Dave and Reed also chime in .
And Orac – watch out, he is in the most dangerous 6th spot!
M.C. and Julian chime in…
Update 2: Phil Plait, Carl Zimmer and Revere have some good commentary.
Matt, Steve Rubel, John Wilkins, Curious Cat, John Scalzi take note.

This was one of my first posts about blogging, and THE first about the impact of blogging technolgoy on science. A lot of time has passed since then. There are several science-related carnivals now, not just Tangled Bank. There are SEED scienceblogs. It is fun to look back at my first raw thoughts and see if, or how much, I was right or wrong on specifics. Under the fold….

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IAMB of Pooflingers Anonymous is celebrating his first blogiversary today. So, go there and say Hello and check out the Achives if you have not done so before.

DarkSyde interviews Sean Carrol (of Cosmic Variance blog) over on Daily Kos.

Josh Rosenau tagged me with the 4 Meme and I cannot say No. Here it is:

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I went to the Chapel Hill/Carrboro Bloggers Meetup today. Most of the usual suspect opted out tonight, so there were only four of us there, but that did not make it any less interesting.
Who was there? Jackson Fox, Dave Johnson, David Warlick and myself.
What did we talk about? I talked about how great it was for me to move to SEED’s stable of science bloggers.
We talked about the future of book publishing and science publishing, about aggregating science-related blogging, about the BarCampRDU unconference, and the new way to blog a conference.
If you follow all of those links above, you are bound to find something interesting…so go ahead, take a plunge and explore….

The new question-of-the-week was just beemed down from the mothership:

How is it that all the PIs (Tara, PZ, Orac et al.), various grad students, post-docs, etc. find time to fulfill their primary objectives (day jobs) and blog so prolifically?

I do not have a day job! I am a stay-at-home dad.
I occasionally teach – but that is either on Saturday mornings (lab) or evenings (once a week), so that does not take too much time. Preparation also does not take much time.
I am supposed to be writing my Dissertation, but I’ve been very, very lazy for far too long. Most of the writing and statistics is done, but making graphs – hundreds of graphs – is a killer. One of the programs I have to use for many of my graphs works only on Macs and, furthermore, new Macs do not like it. It was last updated in 1982! So, I have a 10-year old PowerMac just for making those graphs. It takes a good dog-walk for that computer to start up. Many minutes for the program to open. Hours to get a single graph looking good…. It’s a major pain. Still, I am going to crack down on it this summer (which may reduce some of my blogging time).
Most of the blog-posts do not take much time to write: you see something cool, grab a link or two, write a brief comment and publish. Even the longer posts do not take that much time away from work – I build them in my head while driving, walking the dog or taking a shower. Once a post is fully formed, I sit down, type it down, and post.
Finally, my sleep schedule is crazy. Thus, I am often awake while everyone else in the house is either asleep or not at home – having peace and quite is quite conducive to blogging.
Once I do get a real job, whatever and whenever it may be, I assume that my blogging frequency will drop somewhat, but I do not see myself ever being so overwhelmed to stop blogging altogether.
This post took less than 15 minutes to write.

If Janet says something, we better listen! So, a little introduction is in place:

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