The ScienceBlogs conglomerate came up with a great idea that is now being implemented: a RSS feed of the most interesting Sb posts as selected by so-called SuperReaders.
http://feeds.delicious.com/rss/SbReaderClub
Each blog submitted for approval two representative readers who would volunteer to submit the "best of" recent ScienceBlogs posts - after the mothership ruled out any overlap between nominated SuperReaders, a RSS feed was started and you can now see the top 5 recommended posts on the right sidebar of the Sb frontpage (to the right of "Wordburst" under TOPFIVE Reader's Picks).
The cool thing about this other than helping us all drink from the firehose of info that is now flowing from the 70 blogs in the network is that posts from lower-traffic bloggers will make it to the frontpage more often. For example, we at Terra Sig world headquarters were pleased to see our post on Salmonella contamination of the Alamosa, CO, municipal water supply make it to the Reader's Picks.
Special thanks to the two Terra Sig readers nominated as our representatives: Liz Borkowski and Prof Ian Musgrave. Liz is with the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy (SKAPP) at George Washington University's School of Public Health and Health Services and a key contributor to the critically-acclaimed public health blog, The Pump Handle. Liz already scours a plethora of science and medical blogs for their weekly Friday Blog Roundup. Her broad attention to public health issues, toxicology, and general medicine should insure adequate representation of a large swath of Sb blogs on the reader's feed.
Ian Musgrave is a senior lecturer in pharmacology at the University of Adelaide Medical School in South Australia, clearly a site necessary for a Friday Fermentable field trip. Dr Musgrave routinely corrects and clarifies my pharmacology posts, keeping me honest and contributing to the high standard of the information leaping from your screen. Ian also keeps an "amateur" astronomy blog, Astroblog, and is a long-time contributor to Talk.Origins and regularly posts well-crafted essays in rebuttal to and in challenging the pseudoscientific claims of the so-called intelligent design community. As with Liz, Ian's breadth of expertise is highly valued in contributing to the Reader's picks.
So, fire up the RSS feed into your favorite reader.
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