Blogging

As I learned a few hours ago, and as a few other Sb bloggers have already announced, Scienceblogs.com will shut down at the end of this month. I'm going to move Aard and continue my blogging, but I haven't figured out where to move it yet. Suggestions from you, Dear Reader, are most welcome. It needs to be done soon, because while I have exported all the blog entries and comments safely to my laptop, I can't do that with the images and PDFs. I have to import the blog onto a new WordPress site and then instruct it to grab all the non-text files from Scienceblogs.com. Which will not be…

In case anyone's interested, the reason that there was no post today is because we had a rather massive windstorm here in the Detroit area that left 800,000 without power. Unfortunately, that number included my wife and me. I valiantly tried to take care of my blogging addiction last night, as the temperature in the house plunged to the 50s. With nothing but residual battery on my laptop and mobile hotspot from my phone I ended up giving up in order to save battery charge, particularly on the phone. Given that the power is still out and I'll be surprised if we get it back before tomorrow or…

A year ago I took a look at the surrounding landscape here at Sb, investigating which of the blogs were active – defined as which ones had seen an entry during the month up to 19 Jan '16. Now I've looked at the month up to 24 Jan '17. The result isn't great. Four blogs have gone quiet and three have re-awoken, bringing the total down to 15. A particularly significant loss from the roster is Josh Rosenhouse's EvolutionBlog. This was one of the original Sb blogs in May of 2006, and Josh's farewell entry is dated 18 October 2016. Not one new blog has been added to the roster in the past two…

Today is Aard's tenth anniversary! And 16 December was my eleventh anniversary as a blogger, since I blogged at Blogspot for over a year before I came to Scienceblogs. 2016 has been a good year for the blog's traffic: about 540 daily readers which is better than 2014 and 2015, very encouraging! It hasn't been a great year for me professionally though, with a number of really bad disappointments in academia, mostly related to nepotism, and quite a lot of financial worries. The latter luckily turned out to be unfounded. And I'm pleased with having directed my biggest excavation yet and…

A year ago I took a look at the surrounding landscape here at Sb, investigating which of the blogs were active – defined as which ones had seen an entry during the month up to 24 Jan '15. Now I've looked at the month up to 17 Jan '16. The result isn't great. Four blogs have gone quiet and one has re-awoken, bringing the total down to 16. Not one new blog has been added to the roster in the past year. You may wonder what the Sb Overlords are thinking about this. I sure do. Here are the currently active ScienceBlogs (apart from the one you're reading). Check them out and drop them a few…

I’ve been blogging for a bit more than ten years now, having started on 16 December, and today Aard turns nine! I was inspired to begin blogging by my wife who started in October 2005. She worked as a news reporter at the time, and journalists were early adopters in Swedish blogging. I was doing research on small grants and applying for uni jobs. In late 2005 we were living happily in a three-room apartment in a former council tenement, my son had just started school and my daughter was a baby. Things have changed a bit over these ten years as we've moved into middle age: both kids are now…

I'm not a big blog reader, sad to tell, and I have almost no insight into what's going on elsewhere in the science blogosphere including ScienceBlogs. But a few days ago I got curious about what the network I'm on is like these days, and I did some investigating. I was surprised by what I found. In the following, when I talk about active blogs, I mean blogs that have seen an entry in the past month. On 24 January, ScienceBlogs had only 19 active blogs.* Eleven of these opened in 2006, Sb's first year. The network had no less than 112 inactive blogs, most of which started after 2006. This…

I’ve been blogging for a bit more than nine years now, and today Aard turns eight! Traffic for Oct, Nov, Dec has been ~450 daily readers. Dear Reader, is there anything you'd like me to write about?

It’s time we had a de-lurk around this here blog! The last one was a year ago. If you keep returning to this blog but rarely or never comment, you are a lurker, Dear Reader, and a most welcome one too. Please comment on this entry and tell us something about yourself – like where you are, what your biggest passion is, what you’d like to see more of on the blog. And if you are a long-time lurker who has de-lurked before, re-de-lurks are much encouraged!

And now for something completely different. There was a time when, as a blogger, I would have been instantly aware of an incident like the one I'm about to discuss, instantly aware of it and all over it within a day. That it's been a few days since this happened, and I remained blissfully unaware of it until yesterday tells me how much I've changed as a blogger since my early days. Sure, some things haven't changed much, as anyone who reads my first post cum manifesto can see if he goes back and reads it, such as the subject matter of this blog and my commitment to science and science-based…

I've been blogging for a bit more than eight years now, and today Aard turns seven. Traffic for late 2013 is ~600 daily readers, pretty low compared to the most recent peak at 1000 in early 2012. This is probably because of my lower posting frequency and because the URLs of individual older blog entries changed when ScienceBlogs migrated to WordPress last year. The lower posting frequency, in its turn, is largely due to Facebook, where stuff that might have made short blog entries in 2007 ends up now. Some of the Facebook bits show up here afterwards as Pieces of My Mind. As to Sb in general…

Yes, another science blogging community among the many and yet another where an established print magazine enhances its online presence with a blogging network. And a bit more shuffling of the chairs on the deck as people with established blogs switch places or even some people start up whole new blogging personas. The Popular Science Blogging Network! Here's the welcome post and the list of blogs Welcome To The Popular Science Blog Network Today we’re unveiling 13 new blogs on PopularScience.com, each one home to a notable writer covering a specific area of innovation. We live in an era…

One of the main attractions to me of blogging is my core group of smart and funny regular commenters. The most prolific of them is Birger Johansson. As far as I can tell he's been with the blog since November 2009, almost four years. I've recently invited him to write a weekly guest entry using the many interesting science links he likes to post. And apart from his top-notch commentary, Birger is also an extremely generous man. He has the charming if sometimes a little baffling habit of culling his book shelves periodically and sending me everything he can't find room for anymore. In this…

I feel like blogging but there's not much going on over the summer and I don't know what to write about. Toss me a bone, Dear Reader! Suggest a topic, ask me a question, gimme a link!

Kay Glans used to edit the literary pages of Svenska Dagbladet, Sweden's main conservative* newspaper, and Axess Magasin, a conservative Swedish arts & social sciences mag that also has a TV channel. The latter's standard is high, and I've been particularly pleased to find repeated staunch rebuttals of post-modernism there. What I don't like much in Glans's oeuvre is a tendency for aesthetic idealism and aesthetic conservatism, of the canon-stroking sort. His writers tend to believe that there are classics that every educated person should read. I'm an aesthetic relativist and accept no…

Yesterday, I wrote about students using science blogging as a way to develop an on-line portfolio and document their skills.  One friend wrote me this morning and asked if my instructions to our students were really as simple as I described. Well, no. In fact, it wasn't easy to persuade my colleagues that we should let students blog.  I had to promise them I would scrutinize every post and make sure no one got in trouble.  Luckily, our student bloggers are responsible adults.  Reading their posts has been a pleasure and there have only a couple of cases where I checked with them to make sure…

Why should students blog about science?  Don't they have enough to do already? Last Thursday night I participated in a panel discussion about science blogging (see the video) at ScienceOnline Seattle (#scioSEA)(video) and mentioned that we have two students blogging for us at Bio-Link.  A question I saw afterward via Twitter, from @NurhafizPiers was this: what is the purpose of the blog for the student? I didn't get to answer the question Thursday night, so I'll answer now. We're doing an experiment.  My student bloggers and I are going to try and figure out if their blogs help them get jobs…

It’s time we had a de-lurk around this here blog! The last one was over a year ago. If you keep returning to this blog but rarely or never comment, you are a lurker, Dear Reader, and a most welcome one too. Please comment on this entry and tell us something about yourself – like where you are, what your biggest passion is, what you’d like to see more of on the blog. And if you are a long-time lurker who has de-lurked before, re-de-lurks are much encouraged!

I'm happy to note that Aard's traffic is now back at its pre-Wordpress level: 880 daily uniques in January. I believe this is due to three factors: more frequent entries, a small traffic peak thanks to the Hårby valkyrie, and above all my return to tagging. I don't know why I quit tagging. Just lazy I guess. Tags are the little clickable keywords you've been seeing at the bottom of entries lately. Google places great stock on them. If I understand correctly, the search engine will place a tagged blog entry much higher in the search results than an identical entry without the tags. Tags…

Yesterday the 29th was Aard's sixth birthday, but I was busy making Småland elk meatball lasagna and playing boardgames so I forgot to post. The State of the Blog is good and I have lots of year-end entries to write, as well as a stack of archaeomags to comment on, and hopefully I will get the finder's permission to publish some photographs here of a mind-boggling new Danish find that Aard regular (since at least July 2011) Jakob tipped me off about the other day. Overcast weather has caused me to spend most of my Christmas vacation indoors. I'm looking forward to some crisp and sunny January…