Weblogs
pharyngula | January 15, 2011I'm getting a lot of sad stories about bloggers struggling financially, and I just thought I'd mention a few of them.
There's the perennially struggling Gary Farber, of course. He's a blogger emeritus, having been around for several years longer than I have. Check out his left sidebar for options to help him out.
Gary has mentioned that the fierce and acerbic Roy Edroso of Alicublog is having a rough go of it, too.
Now I learn that Lance Mannion is deep in a hole and scrabbling to escape. He's writing a book on raising a child with Asperger's — somebody ought to snap it up, he's a wonderful…
pharyngula | December 31, 2010He has kept his blog Amygdala going for 9 years now. I have to keep Pharyngula up and running for two more years to catch up with him! (Oh, wait, then he'll have been going for 11 years…dang.)
pharyngula | November 14, 2010It was a long day and a late evening yesterday at Primer Coloquio Mexicano de Ateísmo, and today I plan on doing some sightseeing in Mexico City. I also met a lot of Mexican atheists and skeptics and scientists yesterday, and some of them have blogs and podcasts…so here, Spanish speakers, is a list of excellent sites you ought to add to your regular reading list:
Pócimas, cocciones y brebajes. Una bitácora electrónica que pretende ser filtro de amor a la ciencia, y un bálsamo contra sus enemigos.
La Ciencia por Gusto. Versión ampliada de la columna semanal divulgación cientÃfica de Mart…
pharyngula | November 6, 2010A woman wrote an article on LiveJournal, freely available to readers and for her own interests, and then the managing editor of a small magazine picked it up and published it, without notification and without, of course, payment. When the author contacted the editor and pointedly brought up the matter of the ethical lapse, suggesting that compensation could be in the form of a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism, the editor, Judith Griggs, condescendingly wrote back with this load of tripe:
Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice,…
pharyngula | September 27, 2010It's a dreary phrase when Sarah Palin says it, but it's true for Citizen Radio: they've gone independent, but are still making podcasts with that sharp combination of comedy and interviews. The latest episode features Rachel Maddow. Yeah, you liberals need to listen to it.
pharyngula | September 21, 2010I'm back to teaching developmental biology this term, and one of the things I do in my upper level classes is have students write blog entries on the themes of the course. In the past, I've given them space right here to do that, which I've found to be a parlous course of action — the commentariat here is savage and brutal, and infested with trollish nitwits who can derail threads spectacularly, so I'm doing it a little differently this time around. I've had them create their very own blogs on their own spaces, which has the additional benefit that maybe they can keep them going after they…
pharyngula | September 16, 2010The web community man is making the leap to a position at Scientific American. Congratulations!
Wait, though…he's leaving PLoS? That's kind of a lateral transfer…but maybe the commercial world is more profitable.
pharyngula | August 20, 2010Check out scienceblogging.org — it looks useful. I do wonder if independent science blogs that aren't part of a network will suffer, though — while The Panda's Thumb makes the cut, Highly Allocthonous and a lot of other science blogs didn't.
pharyngula | August 8, 2010Josh Rosenau has happy news: he got married and by now is locked into the connubial borg. Be nice for a brief moment and wish him well.
pharyngula | August 7, 2010I remember seeing sporadic bursts of activity here when Digg, one of the big aggregator sites, would link to something here, but I haven't seen that in a while — but now I learn that there is a fanatically active group of conservative haters at work over there. They call themselves Digg Patriots ("patriots" is one of those words, like "family", that usually get appropriated by people with an extremely narrow view of what it means.) They take advantage of a feature of Digg: in order for an article to get elevated to the front page, where it will get a lot of attention, it has to be voted up;…
pharyngula | August 5, 2010Nick Denton is one of those interesting fellows in online media: my first impression was that he runs gossipy sites and therefore must be shallow, but then you discover that he's actually got very finely tuned antennae to what people want to read…and if it's gossip, then so be it. But at the same time there are some real insights into what draws and keeps the attention of those fickle creatures called human beings. This routine memo from Denton summarizing the popular stories of the month is wonderfully revealing, and a good lesson for anyone writing on the web.
Kevin Purdy's highly…
pharyngula | August 2, 2010Many of the Scienceblog expatriates plus a few others have formed a new collective, Scientopia. It looks like a good bunch of people and a new and maybe better bottom-up approach to organizing a blog network — I'll be reading them and looking forward to their growth.
Adventures in Ethics and Science
Attack Polymerase
Book of Trogool
Candid Engineer in Academia
Chemical BiLOLogy
Child's Play
Christina's LIS Rant
Drugmonkey
Galactic Interactions
Good Math/Bad Math
Neurotic Physiology
Professor in Training
Prof-Like Substance
Sanitized for Your Protection
Skulls in the Stars
The…
pharyngula | July 31, 2010Jen McCreight is participating in that masochistic exercise in prolonged blogging called Blogathon, all to raise money for charity. Take a look, donate if you can, at least give her a little sympathy.
pharyngula | July 26, 2010The case of the various kinds of blogs hosted on ScienceBlogs has come up on Newsweek, and I get quoted trying to explain how I'm unperturbed by a couple of institutional blogs here.
Not all bloggers feel this way, Myers included. "We've known about those [institutional blogs] for some time--they aren't a problem," he wrote in an e-mail to NEWSWEEK. "Those sites were set up under the same conditions as the blogs of corporate scientist Mark Chu-Carroll, who works at Google, and university scientist PZ Myers, who works at the University of Minnesota. ... [The Pepsi blog blurred] the boundary…
pharyngula | July 26, 2010This isn't exactly schadenfreude, it's more like merely recognizing the ungainly nature of the beast — but blog networks are always going to struggle a bit. Take a look at these posts from the Nature Network. It's not doom-and-gloom, it's just wrestling with the medium, as we've experienced here in recent weeks.
I do have a solution for any financial problems, though: we just need to peddle more T&A and celebrity gossip, like Huffpo. Isn't that a bit illiberal, though, to build your brand on the backs of salacious stories about women? Not to mention the quackery and woo.
Although I guess…
pharyngula | July 25, 2010As some of you know, there was a long-running contretemps at Chris Mooney's Intersocktion blog — Mooney took a comment by someone named "Tom Johnson" as evidence that the New Atheists were inciting all kinds of destructive fury and ran with it, promoting it as a solid strike against the same targets he took on in his sad little book, Unscientific America. Then it turned out that much of the conversation on this topic at the Intersocktion was driven by this same fellow, who was posting under multiple pseudonyms. And finally it turned out that a noisy little blog titled "You're Not Helping",…
pharyngula | July 19, 2010Now Bora has left ScienceBlogs. And all is still quiet from Seed Media Group.
A lot of the bloggers here are talking behind the scenes, and I can tell you what it feels like. Bora compares it to Bion's Effect, where the departure of a few people at a party triggers a sudden end to the event. He's wrong (Bora wrong? It happens sometimes). This is a situation rather more fraught. The ship is sinking. The Captain stands at the wheel, saying nothing, doing nothing. All of us on board are edging towards the lifeboats, completely baffled by the paralysis up top, and wondering when some action will…
pharyngula | July 9, 2010Blizzard, makers of the games Starcraft and World of Warcraft, is about to change their forum policies and require the display of real names, basically creating a massive privacy leak if you buy a silly game and go online to get some tech support. There's an excellent summary of why this was a really bad idea here, and apparently Blizzard has an inkling of possible problems — they're waffling about whether to publish employee names under their new terms. If it's not a problem for users, why should employees get an exemption?
Also, I've been sent a few links to sites where people are…
pharyngula | July 9, 2010Bly is the fellow who put Scienceblogs together, and to his credit, one of his responses to the heat generated by the whole PepsiCo debacle is to step forward and be more open. His blog is at Science is Culture — go say hello. Or tell him what to do to fix everything.
pharyngula | July 8, 2010We just got this note from Adam Bly:
We have removed Food Frontiers from SB.
We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.
How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue…