Blogging
aardvarchaeology | December 26, 2007Google Reader is an excellent blog reader, among whose strengths is that it resides somewhere off your computer. This means that you can read blogs from several machines without having to mark a lot of old entries as read. Nor do you have to subscribe to the same feed more than once. Looking at Aard on Google Reader, I've found that the blog has quite a number of subscribers there, but that they are spread across a number of different feed addresses.
Dear Reader, I have a request for you. Could you please make sure that you subscribe to Aard on Google Reader with the following official feed…
clock | December 25, 2007The year in review meme is too random to really capture the highlights of a year on a blog. So, here is a collection of links that I think mark the most important moments of this blog in the last year:
January (297 posts) was dominated by the science blogging anthology and the science blogging conference, so it was filled mostly with re-posts of the old stuff, quick links and only a couple of science posts. This was also the time when my name first appeared in the media. This is also the time when I started writing more about Open Science. All of this combined resulted in a large and…
clock | December 22, 2007If you go to the Scienceblogs.com homepage you will see something like this:
Click on it (let your Firefox allow pop-ups on this site) and play. See the timeline of what happened in science and on scienceblogs during 2007. I am not sure how it works, but I think that the content will change over time (it will be up for the duration of the holidays) so you may have to check it out again and again.
clock | December 22, 2007Tim, the Tech guru of Scienceblogs.com, has done something nice for you again, just in time for the holidays. He has made a widget that you can place on your blog, Facebook profile, LiveJournal or wherever you want, that shows the last five Sb posts in real time, just like this:
If you like the idea and want to install this widget which will bring even more traffic to frequent posters like me, go and pick up the code here.
sciencewoman | December 22, 2007I think I've been tagged at least seven times for the meme where you are supposed to reveal seven unknown facts about yourself. But since I've been baring my soul on this blog for 2.5 years, I'm not sure I can come up with seven things I've never revealed before. Here's my best shot.
I have a case of the imposter syndrome with research. I think it is exacerbated by being very broadly trained and never feeling like I know as much as the specialists in any of my fields.
I enjoy reading blogs more than I enjoy writing my own. But I also have imposter syndrome when I write comments and posts. I…
aardvarchaeology | December 21, 2007Dear Reader, have you got a blog or other web site? Seed now offers widget that will put a handy ScienceBlogs Latest Posts feed on your site. This is what it looks like:
Visit Widgetbox to get it for yourself.
clock | December 20, 2007It is midnight, and the deadline for submission of blog posts for the 2nd Science Blogging Anthology is over. We have recieved 468 entries (after deleting spam - the total was 501) and a jury of 30+ judges has already started reading and grading the entries. We truly believe that we will have the book ready and printed by the time the 2nd Science Blogging Conference starts, on January 18th-19th, so both the participants and you at home will be able to order your copy at that time.
A little later, I will post the links to all of the 468 entries so everyone can see them (and I will not hide…
clock | December 19, 2007Well, just too busy for something original, so it's time for a little linkfest of notable stuff I saw in the blogosphere over the past couple of days:
Carl, Brian, Anne-Marie and PZ report on the Indohyus, a close relative of the whales that lived 48 million years ago in Kashmir.
Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir wrote a provocative commentary about the mind-enhancing drugs - would you use them or not? A discussion is ongoing on Nature Network. Shelley, Janet, Anne-Marie, Vaughan and PZ offer some quite different answers. I think that these drugs, especially as they get perfected and…
clock | December 19, 2007Attila had the idea for a contest for a best designed, prettiest and most functional laboratory website. I picked up on it and posted about it on my blog.
The idea took off and the contest was hosted by The Scientist. And again, I blogged about it. Anton saw my post, and told Karl about it. Karl went on and nominated the website of the Purves lab.
Attila was one of the judges, of course. The results are now in and the winners have been announced - the Purves lab won the Editor's Choice award and one of the Judges' award. Nyborg Lab won the Readers' award. Attila gave his award to the…
sciencewoman | December 19, 2007I did this last year, and apparently it is to be another year-end tradition. Here are the first sentences to each month's first post. January - September will take you to the old site, but don't forget to come back here eventually.
January: While many people went on holiday over the past two weeks, a few people kept their regular blogging habits going strong. (While you were out...(women in science)) Back in the pre-Scientiae, pre-Minnow days when I had the time and energy to keep track of all the women in science blogospheric going-ons.
February: I got an email yesterday from chem guy - a…
sciencewoman | December 19, 2007I think my entry for this month's Scientiae carnival is going to be a top 10 list of women in science news from 2007. This seems like a perfect excuse to kill a few hours web browsing. But I know that whatever ideas I come up with, I will miss some of the best things out there. So if you have a personal favorite women in science story (news item, blog post, report, etc.) that you think should be included in the top 10 list, please let me know.
aardvarchaeology | December 18, 2007Here's one to send you into the vaults, Dear Reader: following John Lynch's lead, I offer links to the first Aard entry of each month this year, each with its first sentence (disregarding carnival announcements).
Jan. "I miss the porn surfers." [link]
Feb. "One thing I've never fought about with my ex-wife nor my wife is money." [link]
Mar. "My friend Stefan Kayat is a truly original man of many talents." [link]
Apr. "Archaeological periods are defined by artefact types." [link]
May. "Archaeology consists of a myriad of weakly interconnected regional and temporal sub-disciplines." [link]
Jun…
awild | December 17, 2007An image search for one of my favorite ants, the Atta leafcutters, returns a jarring juxtaposition of terrorists and ants:
Google Search: "Atta"
sciencewoman | December 17, 2007
The call for the next Scientiae carnival is out. The next edition will be ably hosted New Years day at hreidoplus.de by Jokerine. She'll need your posts by December 31st and is open to lots of ideas: "the last year in review...new years resoltuions....(woman in science) party trivia...how everything will be different next year (for women in science)..." So don't forget to submit.
Propter Doc has posted a new edition of the post-doc carnival. It's "Postdoc: The Musical." Check it out.
December 20th is the last day to submit a post for consideration in the 2008 Open Lab science blogging…
sciencewoman | December 17, 2007Mommy Monday is on holiday until January 7th.
Note that this is very different than Mommy being on vacation until January 7th. I don't think that Mommies actually get vacations. We will however be taking about 10 days to visit our parents.
Other posting will continue pretty much as usual at least until we leave for our trip.
retrospectacle | December 16, 2007Page 3.14 asks, in a poll which you should all go participate in, which language should ScienceBlogs branch into next?
I voted that the next ScienceBlogs should be in Chinese, due to their up-and-coming science programs as well as the massive amounts of people who could stand to benefit from educational blogs in Mandarin. However, you have the inevitable down-side of censorship in China itself. My parents (who live in Suzhou) cannot read my blog, or any ScienceBlog here, due to censorship. Why? I have no idea. The other angle is that China is seperated by many spoken language barriers, but…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2007In early October two years ago, we had a party. During that evening, a journalist friend helped my wife set up a (pseudonymous, s3kr1t) blog on Blogspot which persists to this day.
I didn't catch on immediately. I'd been a BBS aficionado since the late 80s, regularly spending an hour or two a day conversing on-line. But after two months of reading my wife's blog, I started to feel that maybe blogging might be something for me too. After all, I was already writing on-line anyway, but for a small audience of longtime BBS friends who didn't necessarily share my obsessions. Also, the BBS format…
clock | December 15, 2007Matt and Mrs.Whatsit tagged me with the 7-meme and 8-meme and I have been struggling with the ideas as to how to respond. I am usually a sucker for memes. I always do them. But there is nothing - weird or not - about myself that I have not already mentioned on this blog at one point or another (except things that I will never say, as I do not want to endanger my job, my marriage, or my good relationships with the family, in-laws, neighbors, friends and colleagues). So, instead, I will challenge you: have you done more memes than I did in your blogging career? List them all. Here are…
clock | December 15, 2007Janet, John and I did this last year. Now John is reminding us again and I hope more people pick it up as it is quite fun to do. The idea is to link back to your first post of each month of the year and to copy and paste the first sentence of each of those posts. Let's see if it is all ClockQuotes for me this year, as I tend to schedule them at 4am, so they are likely to be first posts of the day, thus also of the month - I tend to post substantive stuff around noon. Just check all the months' archives and browse the titles that are interesting to you (2555 posts so far this year!):…