Blogging
aardvarchaeology | March 15, 2011Hi Bloggers,
Let me apologize again for the problems that many of you and your readers are experiencing. The attack is ongoing, originating from Turkey and Qatar, and until it stops, Rackspace must block IP ranges in order for the site to be accessible to anyone. They are also unwilling to manually unblock hundreds upon hundreds of individual IPs. They have advised that we invest in a firewall and additional services from them, but we are still working out what these will cost and how effective they will be. I am not sure if I was correct in thinking that these attacks are not malicious,…
aardvarchaeology | March 14, 2011Here's an idea that I'd like some reader feedback on.
Would it be worthwhile to put together an EPUB e-book, about as long as a 200-page paperback, of selected blog entries of mine? I'm thinking I'd organise it in thematic sections and sort each section chronologically. And publish the thing for free on Smashwords.
If I go through with this, what EPUB authoring software should I use? Preferably for Linux.
aardvarchaeology | March 9, 2011Dear Bloggers,
We have been forwarding reports from bloggers and users to our hosting service, Rackspace, over the past few days. After monitoring our traffic and these reports, Rackspace has determined that ScienceBlogs is experiencing a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and has blocked a range of IP addresses involved. While this means that ScienceBlogs is now loading correctly for most users, the attack is still ongoing and other users may still encounter sporadic loading problems, or be blocked entirely if they were incorrectly included in these preventative measures.
We're…
omnibrain | February 28, 2011There's a great blog called ionpsych being run by Dan Simons (of Invisible Gorilla fame). The posts are all by graduate students in a science writing for public consumption class. I'm glad people are starting to teach us overly technical scientists how to communicate in graduate school. I'm not aware of any other class out there dedicated to teaching psychology and neuroscience students how to best communicate their ideas to the world.
Anyway, here's one of my favorite posts from Audrey Lustig:
How do people judge fashion design? Fashion experts are notorious for using vague criteria,…
jdupuis | February 25, 2011In the spirit of openness and transparency and "does anybody really care except me" I've included some blog hit statistics below for 2010. These stats are from the Google Analytics application that ScienceBlogs has installed.
For 2010, this blog got 77,630 visits and 91,022 pageviews. To put it all into perspective, to say that this is a fairly insignificant portion of the total traffic for ScienceBlogs is a bit of an understatement. There are defunct blogs that still generate more traffic.
Here are the numbers in graphical format (click to see full year):
And by month (click to see full…
jdupuis | February 14, 2011Welcome to the long-awaited latest instalment in my occasional series of interviews with people in the library, publishing and scitech worlds. This time around the subjects of my first group interview are the gang at EngineerBlogs.org.
From my welcome-to-the-blogosphere post, here's a condensed bit about them:
Cherish The Scientist (EB)I am an electrical engineer with an interest in various areas of electromagnetics, including antennas and numerical simulation techniques, as well as IC packaging. I have completed a master's degree in electrical engineering and am currently pursuing a…
jdupuis | February 14, 2011Way back when, I used to post fairly frequent interviews with publishers, bloggers, librarians and scientists who I thought were interesting people to hear from. Mostly I wanted to hear about what they thought about changes in the scholarly publishing environment.
I've got links to a bunch of them below, mostly to the old blog. (I'll start moving the rest over here when I'm done with the book reviews.)
The last significant interview I did was with Dorothea Salo, way back in October 2008.
What happened?
Well, I decided I wanted my next interview to be with someone involved with publishing at…
jdupuis | February 8, 2011Many thanks to Peter Janiszewski and Travis Saunders of Science of Blogging for reposting my old chestnut, If you don't have a blog you don't have a resume.
I've closed the comments here so you can argue with me over at the other site.
jdupuis | February 3, 2011YASBC. But this time an engineering blog community. This is a fantastic new development if you ask me, especially in a blogging environment domininated by science blogs. Time to let the engineers into the clubhouse, even if that means that we'll have to start serving massive quantities of various beverages to keep them all happy.
Let them explain:
This is a collection of some of the top engineering bloggers on the internet. Surprisingly, scientists seem to outnumber engineers, though we don't think that will happen for long. Some posts link directly back to the author's web page and some…
jdupuis | January 31, 2011The women science bloggers conversation is getting so long and elongated, I thought it would be interesting and, I hope, useful to put all the posts in rough chronological order. By rough I mean that I haven't attempted to order the posts within each day of publication. Perhaps I'll take another pass at the list later on for that.
The original list of posts is here.
2011.01.18. Woman science bloggers discuss pros and cons of online exposure
2011.01.22.Science Online 2011: Even when we want something, we need to hide it.
2011.01.22. Women science bloggers: Some thoughts (er, sorry, felt I…
jdupuis | January 28, 2011Since the Perils of blogging as a woman under a real name panel at ScienceOnline 2011 there's been quite a bit of commentary floating around the science blogosphere about how women are represented within that community.
A kind of introduction:
The perils women sciencebloggers face are not that different than those we face in the real world... though the exposure of the internet can occasionally make it less safe. And the risks that women avoid out in the world, are not unlike those we avoid in the blogosphere. That was one of many important conclusions made in the panel Sheril Kirshenbaum,…
jdupuis | January 25, 2011I'm always very happy to see a librarian blogger embedded in a science blogging network. It's very important to get the library message out beyond just the library echo chamber and to the faculty, students and researchers who are out patron community.
So I was very pleased to see Elizabeth Brown's new blog, Social Disruption, on the Science 3.0 blog network.
From her inauguaral post:
I've been able to found contacts and establish connections to quite a few people through Twitter, friendfeed, Linkedin, and Mendeley. This is/was an important resource as I'm the only person in the library with…
jdupuis | January 23, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Balanced Libraries: Thoughts On Continuity And Change, is from June 6, 2007.
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The library literature. I don't know about you, but those three words strike fear in my heart. When I think library literature,…
jdupuis | January 19, 2011Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference.
Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…
aardvarchaeology | January 19, 2011It's been almost a year since the last de-lurk. Aard has hundreds of regulars, thousands if we adopt a generous definition of "regular", and most of you are lurkers -- quiet readers who don't say much. So, everybody, please comment away, as briefly or verbosely as you like, and do consider telling us a little about yourself! Also, questions and suggestions for blog entries are much appreciated.
And note that re-de-lurks are much encouraged! You see, I have no way of knowing if a lurker ditches Aard. So let me know you're still around.
jdupuis | January 12, 2011First of all, let me make this perfectly clear: Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters is a seriously terrific book. If you're a blogger, if you're interested in the phenomenon of blogging or even if you're just interested in where the media are headed, then you owe it to yourself to read this book.
I wanted to get that out of the way because, while I really enjoyed the book, there were some things that I would have liked to have seen done a bit differently and I be focusing on those quibbles more than on the things I liked about the book…
jdupuis | December 17, 2010For those that haven't heard about the NASA/arsenic bacteria story that's been exploding all over the science blogosphere over the last couple of weeks, I like the summary over at Jonathan Eisen's Tree of Life blog:
NASA announced a major press conference
at the conference they discussed a new Science paper claiming to show the discovery of a microbe that could replace much/some of its phosphate with arsenic
initial press coverage of the paper was very positive and discussed the work as having profound implications for understanding of life in the universe - though some scientists in some of…
aardvarchaeology | December 16, 2010
Today is my fifth birthday as a blogger! (Here's my first entry from 2005.) Five years, that's 13% of the time I've been out of the the womb so far. I had no idea that I'd be doing this. Funny how your life can change.
My mean number of unique readers per day has been as follows.
2006: 157 daily readers
2007: 852 daily readers
2008: 937 daily readers
2009: 714 daily readers
2010: 1005 daily readers (updated after year's end)These stats might suggest that the blog has just regained its health after a serious slump last year, but actually the mean values for '07 and '08 are skewed by huge…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010Yes, it was quiet for a while there, but it seems that change and disruption are inevitable in the world of science blogging.
Welcome to Yet Another Science Blogging Community: Occam's Typewriter.
Apparently born amidst much controversy and drama, it's a new community formed mostly (all?) from former Nature Network bloggers. For at least a bit of the inside story, run on over to NN survivor Eva Amsen's blog for My friends moved away, but I have their new addresses which seems to nicely encapsulate the science blogging world over the last six months or so.
Anyways, here's the really very fine…
gregladen | December 3, 2010Many months ago, the fossil primate "Ida" was reported to the world with much fanfare, including an entire mass market book and a huge press conference, and everything else one can possibly do to announce a new fossil find. Science bloggers and others got rather upset at the Ida team's over the top fanfare, though few bloggers ever explained why it was a bad thing to make everyone on the planet notice an important new scientific find (and no one made the claim that Ida was not very important). One of the things the Ida team did was to use the term "missing link" in connection with that…