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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That’s a really good point, Marco. I do find a lot of blogs by looking through the comments and appreciate how responsive bloggers are to both comments and emails. However, there are many people who prefer to read posts without participating in the discussion (lurkers, in blog-speak). I know there are many blogs which I read religiously, but do not comment on regularly. If people relied only on responses to posts in order to find new blogs, lurkers who blog would be left out of the loop. Might be a minor point, but I think everyone deserves a shot at web traffic!
A never-ending list is not useful, of course. It’s best if bloggers do some periodic housekeeping to weed out inactive links, or at least list those they really read, as opposed to respect or know of.
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I see what you mean, Anna. And I agree on the fact that everyone deserves his/her visibility, but to me seems very hard to get interested to someone who doesn’t participate to the public conversation. It’s like going out with a groups of people and never say a word…
I don’t mean we need to be rude with lurkers or with bloggers who don’t like to comment our blogs, but I don’t think I will so easily become a readers of their blogs. At least until they don’t interact.
When I started to partecipate to public web forums or newsgroups, back in the mid 90s, I was told that lurking was a good practice until you don’t get the rules of the groups you’d like to join. And in this way I appreciate lurking and lurkers also in the blog-era. Continuing the comparison, in those days, opening a new personal forum or newsgroup being just a lurker meant that no one would even know of your forum/group, so you would have an blind object, filled just with the contributions from a single (and only) member.
Nowadays, opening a blog as a lurker is not as isolating as it was, but the best feature of blogging is interaction: what would I do with a oneway comunication?I hope I didn’t make too much mistakes and everyone could get what I mean: I’m still half asleep…
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Yes, absolutely, lurking does defeat the purpose of blogging, in some respects. The lurker issue aside, I am still, I am loathe to give up blogrolling as a whole. Maybe it’s old-fashioned of me, but I see the benefit of having links on the same page as the blog. Blogrolls may well become eclipsed by other applications or widgets in the near future, but right now they are still the most widely used tools in making and maintaining connections between bloggers. I am not at all familiar with FriendFeed et al. and am scared to comment too strongly, but I feel that until they are integrated into everyone’s blogging platform (they aren’t, are they? Neil?) they will be secondary to blogrolls.
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It’s not the case of being old-fashioned or not, I think. I prefer to consider the blogroll as a first, or an early, attempt to find a common, collaborative space where blogger could build their networks of contacts. I don’t mean this is the reality, but a way of interpreting the decay of blogroll as a tool to build your own network. I can’t imagine the future on this topic (unluckly :-)) but I tend to think to blogroll as a thing from the past, like horse riding before the invention of cars. Maybe a too strong image. But it seems that we are in the middle of a process of transition from blogroll to something else (a widget, a new social tools or what else). In this sense, I agree with you Anna: blogroll are still useful for some aspects of networking on the web. My point of view wouldn’t deny it, but push the reflexion a little bit forward and, mainly, on the practice of our practice as bloggers.
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Consider a clean canvas then. Say you were designing your own blogging platform. What apps/widgets/features would you like to see on it for community-building purposes, if not blogrolls? I think it’s no secret that Nature Network is considering an update to the blogging application, and I am sure that (executable) ideas would be very much appreciated.
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Just remembered this thread about favorite science blogs that Matt Brown started ages ago.
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