Blogroll
Anna Kushnir
Wednesday, 18 June 2008 16:35 UTC
I am feeling subversive this afternoon. NN, while I love it dearly, occasionally doesn’t cut it for me. I need a blog roll and I need it now, especially if I am to fulfill my new role as online community management intern (my job is cool, it’s true).
So here’s what I am going to do. I am going to fake a blog roll and hope that contributions from others (this means you) fill it out and keep it going.
Please add your own favorite science blogs. I will also write a blog post devoted to the list of blogs that I am reading and hopefully, the handy RSS feeds will keep people coming back to my list every time I update it. Please do the same. In doing so, maybe we can integrate the outside science blogging world into our own.
A Blog Around the Clock
Bug Girl’s Blog – Hilarious and painfully smart.
Cocktail Party Physics – My inability to achieve anything higher than a C in college physics doesn’t stop me from enjoying this blog.
Omics! Omics!
Pondering Pikaia
Skepchick
Terra Sigillata
The Daily Transcript
Updated 18 June 2008 16:38 UTC
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FriendFeed and similar tools are an alternative to blogrolls if you want to know what a blogger is interested in.
A few weeks ago Cameron Neylon and I had similar posts (here and here) about a Nature News story. We were cross-posting in the comments. Brian and Henry had a similar situation just recently about
petrolgas spending. This is not a major issue, but it would be nice if we had metablogging tools, i.e. a customized RSS feed on related topics that also includes the comments. -
I think it’s easier to scan a blogroll than involve another website
Why? All I get from a blogroll is a very long list of blogs, with obscure titles telling me nothing about their content. Furthermore, a lot of them are likely to be inactive or dead, since the blogroll creator will have realised that maintenance is a complete pain. Trust me, blogrolls are good for nothing :)
Trust me again when I say that the “self-contained” aspect of Nature Network is only a minus; a huge turnoff that prevents many smart people with ideas from participation.
I’ve just learned that I will be passing through London this year, but it will be on Aug 2, on my way home to Brisbane. I hope the science blogging conference goes well, look forward to reading the write-ups.
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May I suggest, as I just did on Anna’s blog, a NN community blogroll in the form of a wiki?
I found the site AcademicBlogs quite easy to navigate. When you want to know generally about the theme of a blog, you don’t have to peruse X posts before you get an idea. And it would be possible to centralize everyone’s suggestions such as to learn new sites rather than the extensively repetitive blogrolls of the limited number of sites one person can frequent in a day while pursuing their career as well.
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Heather, Connotea provides wikis, either for individuals or groups — maybe that would be an option?
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Omigod. Wikis. Now I’m really lost.
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Ah, Maxine, I knew you’d somehow drag me kicking and screaming onto Connotea. :-) Well, if you all decide on it, I think it would work out fine.
Henry – you’ll learn about them at the latest, at the end of the summer. It’s just another way to update pages, like a group blog open to anyone, but with traceability and a standardized and simple format.
(My whine about them is learning yet another markup, even if fairly simple, and think that wikis could take a page from blogging software for WYSIWYG.)
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For those that don’t know (I didn’t until 2 years ago), WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get.
For a detailed description, see the WYSIWYG wiki
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My Connotea wiki is here, if anyone is interested to take a look to get the drift.
All Connotea users automatically have one (they call it a “community page”), but you can also set up additional ones if you like, individual, group, open or private. -
Embarrassingly enough, I didn’t know what WYSIWYG stood for until… right about now. Thanks, Graham.
Eva – Sorry, should have commented earlier. I love Carl Zimmer’s science tattoo collection. I check in every once in a while to see if there is anything I have the courage (or interest) to appropriate, but nothing has struck my fancy so far. If I were to translate my own scientific interests into a tattoo, I would wind up with either a signaling cascade or a virion somewhere on my body. Neither option is appealing! Off topic again, sorry.
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interesting discussion out of a “which-scienceblogs-do-you-like-post”.
I partly agree with neil: I don’t see the blogroll as a so useful feature as described in most of the literature about blogs. what is really interesting about all the blogging phenomena is the possibility to interact easily with other bloggers. every time I emailed a blogger, I got a reply. and whta I found really important is the possibility to post a comment. this interaction between readers and writers, or among bloggers, this is the real “new” thing.
most of the blogs I read are links I collected through comments, because the comments cited a blog or, most of the time, because the comment was interesting and I follow the link to the blog of the person who left the comment.
I don’t have a clear opinion on NN yet, but I don’t think a neverending list of links would be useful. I’d prefer a stimulating discussion.
(of course I already checked out your profile to see if you have a blog or not… :-P)
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