Science Blogging Challenge: Get a Senior Scientist Blogging
Matt Brown
Friday, 05 September 2008 14:38 UTC
As announced at the London Science Blogging Conference on August 30th 2008, we hereby challenge all scientists to get a senior scientist blogging. The ultimate aim is to help scientific blogging gain more momentum and credibility – and also to have some fun. Points will be awarded for:
• The seniority and reputation of the blogger (both in absolute terms and in comparison to the person who convinced them to blog)
• Their previous lack of experience with blogging and other new-fangled online habits
• The quality and quantity of the posts, their relevance to science, and any demonstrable positive impact they might have already had
• Other criteria that will no doubt occur to us later
Please submit nominations (including self-nominations) by email to ‘t dot hannay at nature dot com’ by January 5th 2009 using the subject line ‘I got a senior scientist to blog’. All formal judging will take place shortly after this date, but we encourage early nominations so that we can sign up for the RSS feeds. Please include:
• Your name and affiliation
• The name and affiliation of the blogger
• A link to the blog
• Any interesting anecdotes, or reasons why you think it deserves to win
The winning blog will earn the chance to be included in The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2008. The blogger and instigator will also each earn expenses-paid trips to Science Foo Camp 2009, to be held in July or August (exact date still to be confirmed) at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.
The decision of the judges (that’s us) will be announced in January 2009, will be final, and will probably be somewhat arbitrary.
Good luck!
Peter Murray-Rust
Cameron Neylon
Richard P Grant
Timo Hannay
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Replies
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I am so all over this.
Here’s a question, though: what if I get two senior scientists blogging? Will their combined reputations push me over the edge into the winner’s circle even if each one separately is not deemed “most senior”?
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I think ‘The decision …will probably be somewhat arbitrary’ is their cover-all clause for such cunning approaches.
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If someone in the Bay Area wins, I’m going to call foul.
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On top of which, I might even call fowl.
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Heh. Very good, Karen.
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“The winning blog will earn the chance to be included in The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2008.” The emphasis is on the word “chance”. In other words, such a blog post will, I presume, be submitted via the submission form. All submissions will be judged on merit after December 1st by a panel of independent people who will decide which posts will be included. The ‘senior scientist’ post will be included only if the panel thinks it deserves a spot in comparison to all the other entries. No a priori fast-track.
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Yes Bora, right. Winning blog entries will be nominated for Open Lab. We’re not implying that they would receive any special treatment from the judges.
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The article in The Economist says so, so I’ve been bombarded with e-mails asking if that was true.
http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/09/science_blogging_etc.php
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Actually, I thought we were.
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The Economist is an independent publication so what is in it is not the responsibility of anyone at Nature Network or elsewhere in NPG.
Nature is regularly bombarded with emails from people who think we have published something that has actually been incorrectly reported elsewhere. I am not suggesting that the Economist has reported anything inaccurately on this occasion, but this situation happens a lot. (We are also bombarded with emails by people who have misread articles about Nature content that do report content accurately; or who have judged an entire article based on a headline. Basically, one cannot avoid being misunderstood or misquoted – it is a fact of life.)
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