Blogging
clock | June 3, 2007Remember to Blog For Sex Education. Put this logo on top of your post if you like. Then paste your permalink in the comments of this post and Renegade Evolution will put together a linkfest.
clock | June 2, 2007One of the very first bloggers I have ever read, and always one of the best, Steve Gilliard has died. He was exactly the same age as me. His powerful voice will be greatly missed. The last few months of the blog (as of the move to a new domain) appear not to be accessible, but you can check the years of archives of the old version of the News Blog.
clock | May 31, 2007It is high time a blogger wins this prize, don't you think? If you are in Europe or Israel, and you have a life-science blog, apply for this award:
EMBO Award for Communication in the Life Sciences
Call for entries 2007
DEADLINE 30 JUNE 2007
Description of the award
The award is intended for scientists who have, while remaining active in laboratory research, risen to the challenge of communicating science to a non-scientific audience. The winners of the EMBO Award are nominated for the EU Descartes Prize for science communication.
Prize
The sum awarded is Euro 5.000, accompanied by a silver…
clock | May 30, 2007...to Blog For Sex Education on June 4th and to blog about the sea (oceanography, marine biology and conservation, cool cephalopod pictures...) by the June 8th inaugural Carnival of the Blue.
clock | May 29, 2007It happens to many bloggers sooner or later, and now it happened to Danica - someone is completely stealing and mirroring her blog (and of course earning money from adSense while doing it).
Unfortunately for the guy, he (I am assuming it's a he) chose the wrong person to infuriate. Danica is an IT expert and an experienced blogger and she is mad like hell right now (and you don't want that happening to you!) and she knows how to deal with such cases.
This includes actually posting (in hope the guy is reading his own creation) exactly what she will do to him. Perhaps the pirate will…
clock | May 27, 2007Go and read this excellent interview with Leo Lincourt on Pollyticks.com. Great stuff about blogging, politics and the Carnival of the Liberals.
aardvarchaeology | May 24, 2007My dear SciBling and fellow big-nose European, Bora/Coturnix, has a wonderful story to tell! After seeing an interesting job ad (regarding a position as on-line community manager for the Open Access journal publishing house Public Library of Science) he blogged about it and said he'd really like the job. In a matter of hours, a PLoS editor commented on Bora's blog and asked if the blog entry should be considered as a formal job application -- and Bora got the job! I gather what did it was a combination of his excellent blogging and the way he interacts with his many readers in the comments…
clock | May 24, 2007Yes. I said I wanted this job. And, in a very new and interesting way, after a fun interview, I got it. Signed and faxed the contract yesterday. Will be in San Francisco for a little while in July, then telecommute afterwards. Can pajamas be deducted as tools one needs for the job? Exciting!
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2007The fifteenth Four Stone Hearth blog carnival is on-line at Greg Laden's blog. Check it out! Archaeology and anthropology to move you and soothe you and treat you right, baby.
clock | May 23, 2007Eighteen year old Samantha Larson did it. Here is the story. Here is her blog.
(hat-tip: Ruchira Paul)
aardvarchaeology | May 23, 2007Popular blog indexing service Technorati has revamped its graphic design and appears to have quit ranking blogs. Now how will I know if I have any personal worth?
Technorati keeps track of how many different sites have linked to yours over the past six months. This figure is called your blog's "authority". Engadget, Boingboing and Gizmodo are currently the top three, with authority assessments of over 19,000. The most popular ScienceBlog, Pharyngula, has authority 2,629. Aard currently has authority 266.
Until yesterday, Technorati provided a ranking figure along with your authority…
retrospectacle | May 22, 2007What the heck is RSS? Little did I know that I was reading news and blogs the Old Slow Way rather than the New Fast Way. Jeez. I'm almost as embarrassed as when it was pointed out that I still use Friendster, which is, like *so* 2003.
RSS is sweet, and this video created by The Common Craft Show (which is a pretty good example of how to explain something to visually-inclided grad students in under a minute) breaks it down. Word and RSS to your mother, yo.
Click To Play
There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could…
aardvarchaeology | May 21, 2007Wednesday 23 May will see the Four Stone Hearth blog carnival appear in all its archaeo/anthro glory at Greg Laden's blog. If you have read or blogged anything good on those themes lately, then make sure to submit it to Greg ASAP. (Yes, you can submit stuff you've found on other people's blogs.)
I'm hosting a blog carnival myself on Thursday 24 May: Carnivalesque, on Ancient and Medieval history. Please help me stock that carnival with good reading matter! Submit here.
clock | May 20, 2007Sometimes what happens after is much more interesting than what happens during conferences:
If one more person had said that the internets were "revolutionary" and "transformative" I would have required medication.
It felt like watching TV, with smart people telling me things I already knew.
Full of folks who are too young to miss the Ramones but would die to be them.
clock | May 19, 2007Chapel Hill is really becoming a big center for bringing together scientists (of which there are so many in the area) and techonology innovators (of which there are also many in the area). Not just the Science Blogging Conference, either!
Renaissance Computing Institute and Microsoft are organizing The 2007 Microsoft eScience Workshop at RENCI at Friday Center in Chapel Hill, on October 21-23, 2007:
It is no longer possible to do science without doing computing.
The use of computers creates many challenges as it expands the realm of the possible in scientific research and many of these…
clock | May 17, 2007Business customers and children can be tough to manage online, but can you imagine managing scientists! They are already hard enough to satisfy in their native environment offline (e.g., to look beyond the usual metrics when awarding tenure). I know, I am making links in this post so cryptic, you'll just have to click to see what on Earth I am talking about and make your own connections...
clock | May 17, 2007Sure, she did not post about it, but a little bird told me that today is Jennifer Ouellette's birthday so go and say Hello and Happy Birthday to everyone's favourite physics writer/blogger!
clock | May 16, 2007Maxine Clark, Attila Csordas, Deepak Singh, PZ Myers, Pedro Beltrao, Jean-Claude Bradley, Pierre Lindenbaum, Peter MR, Andrew Walkingshaw, Anna Kushnir, Timo Hannay, Richard Akerman and yours truly are some of the 200 people invited by Google, Nature and Tim O'Reilly to participate in this summer's Science Foo Camp. Apparently, the last year's camp was a blast. I'll give it another 48 hours to think before I reply, but I hope it is a Yes and that I will go, evangelize for Open Science and learn a lot about the ways it can be implemented.
aardvarchaeology | May 15, 2007Time to ask the regulars to push some buttons again. (You do realise that this is just an experiment in behavioristic psychology?)
On average, this blog sees about 90 daily visits from returning readers. If, on average, the blog's regulars visit the site only every second day, this means that I have about 180 steady readers. Yet at the moment, Aard has only been favourited by ten people on Technorati and graded by twelve on Bloggtoppen.
See those buttons below my profile, top left? Go, kids, go! Push the buttons! Push, push, push! Buttons, buttons, buttons! If you do, I will absolve you of…