ResearchBlogging Awards 2010

I was in Boston last two days, and mostly offline, so the news of the announcements of ResearchBlogging.org Awards found me on Twitter, on my iPhone during a brief break of the PRI/BBC/Nova/Sigma Xi/WGBH/The World meeting. Thus, apart from a couple of quick retweets, I did not have the opportunity until now to take a better look and to say something about it.

You can see the news at the Seed site and download the official press release. And listening to the podcast about the awards AND opening the envelopes with winners's names is great fun.

Then, take some time to go through the list of all Winners and Finalists - check them out and bookmark those you like - these are the best of the best. The blogs were nominated by the broader science online community, the finalists were picked by a star-studded panel of judges, and the final winners were determined by votes of the members of the ResearchBlogging.org community.

First, in a tough competition of some brilliant bloggers, my SciBling Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science blog swept the board, and deservedly so. He won in three categories: Research Blog of the Year, Best Lay-Level blog and Blog Post of the Year. Of course, this is the Year of Duck Sex, so it is not surprising that the Blog Post of the Year is on this exciting topic, Ed's Ballistic penises and corkscrew vaginas - the sexual battles of ducks.

I won something, too. I felt I had a chance in the category of Research Twitterer of the Year - an lo and behold: I won in this category! Or, as Michael Robinson said on Twitter, this title should be better called "Esteemed Twitterary Figure" ;-)

I was also nominated in the category of Best Blog -- Biology, but did not believe I could win it in company of some wonderful bloggers who write posts about peer-reviewed research much more often than I do. But I guess the community thought that when I do write, I write well, so I found myself surprised winning in this category as well. This definitely motivates me to do more of this...and I have already assembled a nice little pile of recent papers to blog about very soon.

Thank you all for your support. And big Congratulations to all the winners and finalists, all great bloggers worth your regular daily reading. And if you blog about scientific papers and are not aggregating your posts on ResearchBlogging.org yet, perhaps it's time to apply today.

Update: Read this great interview with Ed Yong about Life, Universe and Blogging (because Blogging IS Everything Else)