Blogging
jdupuis | December 18, 2012Yes, the science blogging community has certainly seen some gyrations in the last few years with a bunch of new networks sprouting up, sometimes from the ashes of other networks, sometimes completely on their own.
The latest is Phenomena: A science salon hosted by National Geographic magazine.
Phenomena is a gathering of spirited science writers who take delight in the new, the strange, the beautiful and awe-inspiring details of our world. Phenomena is hosted by Jamie Shreeve, Executive Editor for Science at National Geographic magazine, who invites you to join the conversation.
So far at…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2012Remember blogging? It was really big back in 2005. My wife and her journalist friends all took it up. And eventually I did too -- a bit more than a week before Christmas that year. A year later I got onto Scienceblogs. And look at me now, seven years down the blogging line. Still enjoying myself! Traffic has been down since we upgraded to Wordpress back in spring, but it's slowly recovering.
Are you still doing things you started in 2005, Dear Reader? What things?
jdupuis | October 3, 2012Ten years ago today, three days shy of my 40th birthday, I started a blog more or less on a whim. I have to admit, I only had a pretty vague idea of what blogging was all about or what its potential was. After all, my main inspiration for getting started wasn't even a blog at all, but a zine.
Sitting here, all these years later, three days shy of my 50th birthday, I can only say that it's been a wonderful, exciting and sometimes strange trip. The trip has meandered through the broad crossroads of librarianship and science at the beginning of the 21st century and I'm sure will continue to…
aardvarchaeology | September 1, 2012The dust has settled after Sb's migration in late May from Moveable Type to Wordpress. I'm glad we switched, but we lost a lot of traffic in the process. Mainly it seems to be due to changing URLs (the web address of each blog entry) that threw the search engines off and lost us RSS subscribers. In Q3 2011 Aard had 780 daily readers on average and a Google rank of 7. In Q3 2012 it's looking to be more like 540 daily readers, and the Google rank is 6. Dear Reader, to keep things lively here, I'd be grateful for your help. In the following weeks, if you read something you like here, please hit…
aardvarchaeology | June 25, 2012Aard has a persistent problem after the migration of Sb to Wordpress. Every day up to a couple of hundred comments spontaneously get "reported" and become invisible. This mostly hits old entries but also some of the newer ones. So don't despair if your comment shows up on the site briefly and then disappears. Nobody's out to get you. I check the list often and re-approve the erroneously hidden comments.
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2012An unfortunate side effect of the upgrade to Wordpress has been that the feed URLs for this blog have changed, costing me 2/3 of my traffic. This will hopefully be rectified soon, but right now the URLs are:
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/feed/
or
http://scienceblogs.com/aardvarchaeology/feed/atom/
If you don't know what this means, Dear Reader, then you are probably reading the blog by visiting it in your web browser. And if so, you have no problem with this.
Sadly, people who read this blog with feed reading software are unlikely to get this message unless they suddenly one day…
aardvarchaeology | May 20, 2012Blogging from a plane over Germany! Whee! A Boeing 737-800 Berlin-Stockholm operated by Norwegian. My 1st experience with internet on a plane.
aardvarchaeology | May 16, 2012ScienceBlogs was handed over to National Geographic long ago. Behind the scenes, work has progressed to migrate the site from Moveable Type to Wordpress and put NG's yellow-margins branding onto everything. And now the switch-over is imminent. Late May maybe? The new site is already up on an interim URL. I am now copying the past few weeks' entries after the migration team copied the database for automatic transferral. Everything looks good except that I haven't figured out the Scandinavian diacritic characters yet. Any shakiness and flakiness in the near future will no doubt be due to the…
jdupuis | May 10, 2012I'd like to extend a huge science librarian blogosphere welcome to Information Culture, the newest blog over at Scientific American Blogs!
This past Sunday evening I got a cryptic DM from a certain Bora Zivkovic letting me know that I should watch the SciAm blog site first thing Monday morning. I was busy that morning but as soon as I got our of my meeting I rushed to Twitter and the Internet and lo! and behold!
Information Culture: Thoughts and analysis related to science information, data, publication and culture.
I'm always happy to see librarians invading faculty and researcher blogs…
kbonham | April 17, 2012My birthday was last week, which means I get a whole new chance to set some New Year's resolutions. My regular readers (all 3 of you) might have noticed a serious dearth of posting lately. I have many excuses:
1) I'm (hopefully) coming up on my last year as a PhD student, and I'm in serious data-generation mode.
2) I've been spending more time on climbing, photography, and other things that are not science-related in order to give my brain some down time.
A photo I took of 2 friends on the side of Mt Cannon in New Hampshire
3) The current back-end of Scienceblogs is truly awful. While…
aardvarchaeology | January 17, 2012It'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!
(Note that due to spam bots and a faulty filter, I have to moderate comments by hand, and so it may take a while for your comment to become…
aardvarchaeology | December 29, 2011I began blogging at Blogspot a bit more than six years ago. And five years ago to the day, Aard went live here on Sb! Blogging and the interaction with you, Dear Reader, are a continuing source of daily enjoyment to me.
But looking at the surroundings, things sure have changed at Sb in five years, though you can't tell from the site design. Aard is one of the longest-running blogs still active here. These days I feel more like I'm at Blogspot again: works well, no frills, no fraternisation with the neighbours.
Sb is no longer a hip well-funded site that attracts big bloggers. We haven't had a…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2011
Today is my sixth birthday as a blogger! Normally these days I would use Twitter and Facebook for such a brief message, but it is after all blog-related.
Here also are the latest pics of an Aard reader wearing one of the blog t-shirts (order here). Andrew Broome is a culinary engineer based in Palmerston North, New Zealand. He comments on the pic below that the spot is "probably as far away from you as it'll ever get, short of being sent into space" -- Bluff, SNZ is the southernmost town in the country. Thanks Andrew! I really want to go to NZ.
Dear Reader, keep those comments and t-shirt/…
jdupuis | December 6, 2011I'm doing a short presentation tomorrow on blogging for researchers as part of a day-long communications workshop for faculty here at York. And since a few months back I created a reading list for a social media presentation for grad students, I thought I'd expand that list in this post and add some more specifically blogging-related resources.
Enjoy!
Our Blogs, Ourselves (Paul Krugman)
The Power of Blogs in Forming New Fields of International Study
Should you enter the academic blogosphere? A discussion on whether scholars should take the time to write a blog about their work
Social media…
gregladen | November 25, 2011This is not a manual or even a how-to blog post, but rather, what I hope to be a few helpful suggestions that may or may not have already occurred to you. I was motivated to write this because of a series of recent events in which it became obvious that a lot of people, myself included in certain instances, were not managing some of the basic information linked to their on-line identity in the best way.
Let me give you a simple example, which happens to be the first one I came across in this recent series of encounters with eInefficiency. I was working with a group of people at a non-profit…
aardvarchaeology | November 7, 2011
Dear Reader Jim Allen of Bellingen, New South Wales, Australia, kindly volunteered to design some Aardvarchaeology merchandise, for which I am very grateful. Here's Jim at his local museum along with fellow volunteer Charlotte Rogers, in the first picture of readers using their Aard merch! You too can enjoy caffeinated beverages in as stylish a manner as Jim & Charlotte: just head over to the Aard shop for mugs and t-shirts.
jdupuis | October 19, 2011I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating.
The kinds of…
aardvarchaeology | October 12, 2011Wednesday 5 Oct. 17:00. About Fisksätra before the 1970s housing development. Fisksätra shopping centre, HAMN project office.
Thursday 13 Oct. 10:00. About Bronze Age sacrificial sites. Uppsala, Engelska parken, Thunbergsvägen 3, Dept of Archaeology.
Monday 17 Oct. 18:30. About pseudoarchaeology. Stockholm, KTH, Lindstedtsvägen 5, lecture hall D2, Swedish Skeptics.
Thursday 27 Oct. 14:00. About the late-1st millennium aristocracy. Norrköping, Saltängsgatan 7, Senioruniversitetet.
Thursday 3 Nov. 14:30. About the new media. Kristiansand, Vestre Strandgate 7, Radisson Blue Caledonien (!)…
aardvarchaeology | September 26, 2011
Those free Nigerian scam t-shirts never materialised, but still, the affair prompted me to get some excellent merch art made and set up a web shop. A good thing about this is that now I can offer all three designs submitted by Jim Allen, Stacy Mason and Joe Hewitt!
Dear Reader, hie thee over to Ye New Shoppe and check out the wares! If there's any item you're missing and onto which one might conceivably stick the art, then please tell me and I'll try to add it to the lineup.
Now I want you guys to send me pics of yourselves wearing Aard t-shirts and/or swigging beverages from Aard mugs!