The Open Laboratory 2009 - the excitement begins!

Now that the Open Lab 2008 is done and up for sale, it's time to turn our sights towards the next year.

If you read the comments on Sci's post and my post (as well as some chatter I picked up on Twitter/Facebook/FriendFeed and privately), the pick for the 2009 editor is a Big Hit! I am truly looking forward to the year of collaboration with SciCurious on the next edition of the anthology.

But, as you know, the anthology is a collaborative project of the entire science blogosphere. Thus, we need to get started! That means YOU!

First, you need to go into your blog's archives and look at your posts since December 1st 2008. Pick one or two or several that you think are the best, that you like the most, that you think are the easiest to transform from the online medium to the print medium (e.g., those not too heavily dependent on multimedia, videos, podcasts, copyrighted images, lots of links, etc.). Choose essays, poems, cartoons, comic strips, original art. Then submit that using this submission form. That is the only way to submit entries for the next year - posting comments here or blogging about it does not work.

Once you are done with your own archives (and yes, start with your own as nobody knows your stuff as well as you do, or understands which posts are you most proud of - or least embarassed of - than you do), move on to other blogs, your favourite reads, hopefully including as many as possible new and not-as-well-known blogs in that number. Pick some of their posts and submit them as well.

Then, spread the word around the Web about this - point people to the submission form from wherever you think is appropriate: your blog, twitter, Facebook, various forums, etc. Let other science bloggers know about this - more the merrier.

I'd also like for someone to volunteer to design buttons (and provide easy-to-copy-and-paste codes) for submitting entries, something that people can put on sidebars of their blogs to always have handy throughout the year. Contact me if you want to do that.

As I did the previous three years, I will occasionally post the links to entries submitted so far, to avoid too many duplicates as well as to give you ideas and motivation to find and submit more stuff. I will start today as we already have these seven entries:

Highly Allochthonous: Is the Earth's magnetic field about to flip?

Expression Patterns: A Squishy Topic

Prerogative of Harlots: He Blinded Me With Science

Masks of Eris: Mathematics instruction as a fish

Stripped Science: The right pairing (comic strip)

Island of Doubt: Sea level rise a red herring?

Biochemical Soul: Darwin and the Heart of Evolution

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Now it's your turn - here again is the submission form.

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Update: More entries have just come in:

Coyote Crossing: Spermophilus

Neurotopia: The Value of Stupidity: are we doing it right?

Mind the Gap: In which I ponder economies of scale

Neurophilosophy: Amnesia in the movies

Neurophilosophy: Brain & behaviour of dinosaurs

Song for jasmine: Charles Darwin's first theory of evolution