Nature's new blogs portal: add your blog
Maxine Clarke
Wednesday, 05 November 2008 16:10 UTC
From Euan Adie:
We launched a new blogs portal on nature.com earlier this week. It’s part of a general overhaul of blogging at Nature Publishing Group which amongst other things involves link backs from articles to the blog posts writing about them (bloggers get traffic, our readers get conversation around papers – works for us both) and improving the blogging experience for users on Nature Network.
I’ll skip the PR blurb in favour of some good old fashion techie bullet points:
- Nature Blogs is a blogroll of good quality science blogs (quality is a relative term, but there’s no spam or pseudoscience and little press release regurgitation)
- To get onto the blogroll you need to submit your blog
- You can log in to the site with your Network or nature.com (Nature Network) username and password then claim any blogs that you own.
- The blogroll is moderated by the community (once you’ve submitted and claimed a blog you get to vote on submissions)
- To be included in link backs from articles you need to be on the blogroll
- It uses Scintilla to aggregate posts from all of the blogs on the blogroll, then clusters them into stories – groups of related posts.
- We’re trying out Twitter as an alternate view on the stories data – if you follow the NatureBlogs user then a couple of times a week it’ll point you to particularly interesting stories you might have missed. You can also find twittering bloggers by watching NatureBlogs’ following list.
- It uses Connotea’s WebCite web service to work out what links in posts are to scientific articles.
We’re just getting started and there’ll be more developments as other aspects of NPG’s blogging strategy come together.
The next release in a couple of weeks will focus on usability issues and bugs – we know there are a few! – and on the API. (Technical details at Euan’s Nascent post.) Euan is keen to hear any criticisms, bug reports and feature requests – as blog readers you are the target audience after all – so do feel free to email him on blogs@nature.com or direct message natureblogs on Twitter with your feedback!
Updated 05 November 2008 18:11 UTC
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Replies
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I mean far right, sorry!
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Neither of my blogs was there. I submitted one of them (not the NN one, because I didn’t know how to describe it), but I think I tagged and described it in such a way that it won’t get accepted. (And by several definitions I’m not even a science blogger, so I guess it’s fair.)
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I took a look, Eva – some Nature Network blogs (eg Bob’s and Richard’s) are in the A-Z index, others (eg yours and mine) aren’t. If it isn’t obvious how to submit your NN blog then send its URL to Euan in an email (e.adie [at] nature.com), I know he is being kept pretty busy with the floods of feedback he is getting, but he wants to hear from everyone.
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It’s obvious enough, but I just don’t know what to fill out for a description. I avoided doing that for my blog, because I really don’t know what to say about it. Most people have something about their job in there “Blog by a [job title] from [place]” but even that is too confusing for me.
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Woo-hoo, Jon’s Morpholino Musings joins the big time!
(You Nature folks must like them cracklin’ dry…)
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I just submitted my NN blog. The process was pretty easy after going to the Help tab as Maxine suggested. Any idea how long before you find out if you’ve been accepted or rejected?
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I think it is instant for Nature Network bloggers, but if you have any problems with or questions about that site, you can email Euan (e.adie AT nature.com), who created and runs it.
All the best
Maxine.
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