Blogging

I am not a boy scout, but I still believe it is a good idea to be prepared. What to prepare for? Well, in Louisiana, it is the time to prepare for hurricanes and the looming budgetpocolypse. Hurricanes First, the hurricanes and tropical storms. Model image from Weather Underground - best place to track storms (in my opinion). This is pretty simple. Here is what I need to do: Make sure my generator works and I have gasoline Fill up the cars with gas (in case we want to leave) Back up data and stuff Pick up all the toys and stuff in the yard Flashligh Beer That should do it. Of course…

There's ScienceBlogs and recently we got Scientopia. And now I discover Field of Science, another good science blogging community, which has apparently been up for a year and a half though I've managed to miss it. Check it out!

Thanks to Mike the Mad Biologist for tagging me with this meme. Like Mike, I'm not much of a memer, but this one looks interesting (and simple) enough to give a try. The idea is to "Sum up your blogging motivation, philosophy and experience in exactly 10 words" and then to tag 10 further blogs. So, here goes: Bring the world of scientists to librarians and vice versa. That was strangely easy to formulate and I'm not sure if that's a good thing. Similarly, I think it's an overall mission statement rather than something that needs to be implemented with each post I make. Over the long view,…

This past Monday morning a new science blogging community came online: Scientopia! From their Vision: Scientopia is a collective of people who write about science because they love to do so. It is a community, held together by mutual respect and operated by consensus, in which people can write, educate, discuss, and learn about science and the process of doing science. In this we explore the interplay between scientific issues and other parts of our lives with the shared goal of making science more accessible. As a community, we strive to be welcoming of anyone with an interest in science…

The ninety-eighth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at The Prancing Papio. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! The next vacant hosting slot is on 15 September. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

First off, I think this is a really good post (not this self-referring post, but the post I am about to link to) Steak Dinner by Alemi at The Virtuosi In short, this post is about cooking steak and the measurements of the temperature of the meat. Why do I think this is a good post? First, it is just some ordinary everyday event (well, it's not everyday you get steak). The awesomeness just comes from saying "hey, maybe I should plot this temperature data". If the post was just about plotting data, it wouldn't be terrible. But it does something else. It tries to fit this data to some sort…

There's a new science blogging network, Scientopia, it's full of ex-SciBlings and other good bloggers, and it has no ads! Janet Stemwedel of Adventures in Ethics and Science is there, as is Grrlscientist, Krys also of Anthro in Practice, the Voltage Gate, Drugmonkey, Christina Pikas, Mark of Good Math/ Bad Math, the Questionable Authority, Scicurious formerly of Neurotopia, Zuska, PAL MD and others. The site is open to applications from new bloggers. Good luck, guys! Anybody on Scientopia who has written something about archaeology and/or skepticism, and who'd like a share of my traffic, just…

T. DeLene Beeland (Twitter) contacted me last week and was kind enough to offer to interview me for an honest-to-goodness print newspaper -- The Charlotte Observer: Find the future at a 21st-century science library. It;s part of a series of interviews she's done with science bloggers. Here's an exerpt from the interview. My answers to DeLene's questions were about 2-3 times longer than she was able to use, so she's done a great job editing them down to more manageable lengths. Q. What are some of the biggest trending changes in science libraries currently? One thing we're working really…

With this post, I say goodbye to ScienceBlogs. Am I leaving because of the fiasco with the PepsiCo blog? Not directly. That's not to say that there weren't serious issues raised by the whole incident. Many of these lie in the realm of journalistic ethics, at least as understood by people you might regard as affiliated with old school journalistic outlets (notwithstanding the fact that many such outlets currently have a significant online presence). The analyses by Paul Raeburn, Curtis Brainard, and John Rennie all do a nice job setting out the central issues in case, so do click through to…

The 98th Four Stone Hearth blog carnival will run at The Prancing Papio on Wednesday. Submit great recent stuff to Ray, your own or somebody else's. Anything anthro or archaeo goes! The next open hosting slot is on 15 September. If you're a blogger with an interest in the anthro/archaeo field, drop me a line! No need to be a pro.

A lot of Twitter energy was soaked up Friday afternoon by a half stupid article by Virginia Heffernan at the New York Times. Sparked by Sodamageddon, she takes a look at ScienceBlogs for the first time, and doesn't like what she sees: Hammering away at an ideology, substituting stridency for contemplation, pummeling its enemies in absentia: ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd. Though Myers and other science bloggers boast that they can be jerky in the service of anti-charlatanism, that's not what's bothersome about them. What's bothersome is that the site…

A few of us are proposing this session at the upcoming Science Foo Camp at Google HQ this coming weekend: The Joys and Sorrows of Blogging on a Network What with the recent Pepsigate crisis at ScienceBlogs and some rumblings at Nature Network not to mention a bunch of new players on the blogging network landscape, it seems like a good time to take a look at what's going on out there. Let's talk about the past, present and future of science blogging on a network and, indeed, of science blogging itself. Join Eva Amsen, John Dupuis, Jonah Lehrer, Andrew Revkin and Carl Zimmer. I thought in this…

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I pay quite close attention to the InsideHigherEd web magazine. They cover lots of library issues and issues that are relevant to libraries, their blog network is pretty good with solid coverage of higher education issues and Joshua Kim's instructional technology blog covers a lot of ground, much of which is of interest for the library community. Unfortunately, they've never had a very good blog by a librarian. Until now. (They did make an attempt at a library blog about a year ago. We will not speak of it anymore.) Go check out the brand…

Bora Zivkovic for several years has been doing interviews with the attendees at the annual ScienceOnline conferences. The latest interview is with my longtime blog buddy Stephanie Willen Brown, AKA The CogSciLibrarian! What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most? Science needs good public relations right now, and I agree with @ErinBiba's essay in the May issue of Wired "Why Science Needs to Step Up Its PR Game." I'd like to play a small part in the merger of science and PR by training public relations professionals to do good…

Thanks to support from readers and fellow bloggers I'm pleased to say that The Primate Diaries has taken the show on tour. You can update your RSS feed here or follow the #PDEx hashtag on Twitter.

After some consideration, I have decided to move Myrmecos back to its original location: http://myrmecos.net/ I apologize for making everyone change RSS feeds and bookmarks twice in recent months. What's worse, I can't promise that Myrmecos won't move again in the near future. Some intriguing offers have arrived in my inbox and I am thinking them over. My sincere thanks to the various bloggers and support staff here at Scienceblogs for hosting me. I'd especially like to thank Erin Johnson, who brought me into the network and handled some of the difficult blog migration issues. Don't read…

The ninety-seventh Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Zenobia. Catch the best recent blogging on archaeology and anthropology! The next vacant hosting slot is on 15 September. All bloggers with an interest in the subject are welcome to volunteer to me for hosting. It's a good way to gain readers. No need to be an anthro pro.

I'm in north-east Wales for a few days' work on a Universities of Chester and Bangor dig. We've had a rainy day, which meant that we couldn't work effectively for very long. But I did some metal detecting, finding lead spatters that may have to do with 18th century repairs to the 9th century Pillar of Eliseg, and two 20th century coins, and of course a few aluminium ring-pulls. And I took part in de-turfing and trowel cleaning on the flanks of the barrow and the flat field around it. The weather forecast for the next few days looks somewhat more favourable. Meanwhile, here at Sb, the crisis…

What with the recent blogospheric developments, I thought it would be a great idea to reprint a post from a couple of years ago where I turned the tables on Bora and interviewed him about science blogging, science and ScienceOnline. The original post is from March 13, 2008. I'd also like to point you to the interview Bora did with my son Sam after the 2009 conference. And yes, I think "Crazy Uncle" is perfect. Science blogging is like family and I think Bora fits perfectly not as our father or our brother or our cousin, but as our uncle. ============================== Welcome to the…

The fallout of the Pepsigate scandal continues. Bora's recent relative blogging silence left me with a bad feeling, an ominous feeling. A feeling like the other shoe was about to drop. Well, it did. Bora is leaving ScienceBlogs. As with most of Bora's giant summary zeitgeist posts, you just have to read the whole thing yourself. The comments too are incredibly heartfelt. For me, Bora always epitomized ScienceBlogs. He was always the ultimate SciBling and I was so thrilled to be blogging her next to him when I joined. Bora's also always really epitomized science blogging as a whole to…