Don’t forget, after you’ve congratulated him, to remind him to finish his dissertation.
Yeah, my appointed role at the triumph is to play the guy who whispers “Respice post te, hominem te memento” into the conqueror’s ear.
Sheril Kirshenbaum is guest-blogging at The Intersection while Chris Mooney is away, and she is bravely planning on discussing…dare I say it…framing. It’s a subject that gives me the heebie-jeebies, the flibbertigibbits, and a bad case of the surly snarls, but let’s see if maybe Sheril can give it a new perspective—maybe she can do a better job of framing framing.
I cower away from the horror that is MySpace, and I scarcely know what to do with facebook; I’m all at sea on this social networking buzz. Now I’ve gone and signed up for another one, the Nature Network, a social networking site for scientists. I’m still lost. Maybe if I encourage a bunch of you other scientists out there to sign up, some comprehension will begin to gel for me.
Attila Csordas has a nice writeup of the whole magilla which helps. I’m giving it a shot, anyway.
I already notice it lacks those bosomy young ladies in skimpy clothing that always greet me on MySpace, and the contributors all seem to know how to write plain English, so it’s different on those scores.
There’s something about this new blog that tells me I’m going to be a regular reader, but I can’t quite put my finger on why.
Larry Moran has already mentioned this recent article in Cell on this strange new fad of science blogging. He was interviewed along with many others of us, including me. I don’t know about this bit:
The rock star of scientist bloggers is Paul Myers, an associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota, who writes Pharyngula. With about 20,000 visitors per day, Pharyngula is currently the most popular science blog according to Technorati. Myers started writing about 4 years ago. “It was a casual decision. One summer I had some free time and started typing away. And people started coming to the site,” he recalls. “I thought that I would stop in a month or so but I didn’t. I find it useful for communicating with other scientists and the community.” Myers not only writes about his brand of science, developmental biology, but often discusses politics and religion. “The blog would not be as popular if it was only about science,” he says. “I am popularizing science using political issues as a hook.”
This just isn’t good enough. I need to know which rock star. The Roger Waters of the blogosphere would be cool. David Bowie would be nifty, too, although I’m not thin enough. The Keith Richards of science blogging would be troubling … but if I’m the Ozzie, I’m hanging it up.
And who can blame them? Technorati, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is one of those services that watches activity on the web, and then puts up metrics and ranks and scores, and tries to distill the flux into something simpler and more comprehensible, which often reduces to telling you how many people are trying to find pictures of a naked Paris Hilton. When the mob votes, it always seems to lead to the lowest common denominator. The We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party is trying to subvert all that with a campaign to push the WAAGNFNP into the upper ranks of Technorati’s odd WTF category. A “WTF” is a user-written blurb that tries to identify a hot topic and explain something about it—any member of Technorati can write a blurb, and also vote for it, and the WTF page is another ranked list of these popular blurbs. Get in there and rock the system!
There are no Pharyngula blurbs, sad to say, and even sadder, I used to be on their Top 100 Favorited Blogs, and I’ve slipped off the list lately. Don’t forget, new people, you can click here to increase my Technorati favorited rank.
Oh, I hate these difficult questions.
If you’re a professor and you want to change the world, what do you do? In 1993–quit and become an activist. In 2007—start a blog.
Or so it seems. PZ Myers blogging at Pharyngula is probably doing more for evolution than PZ Myers publishing papers in scientific journals. Is that true PZ?
No.
Hmmm, I guess it wasn’t so difficult after all!
A colleague just let me know that I’m mentioned in the “Best of the Web” section of Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News. Yay! It’s a positive review!
It’s in the April 15 issue for all you subscribers.
This worked fairly well last time around, so let’s try it again. If you’d like to have your blog on the Pharyngula blogroll, here’s what you should do:
Examine your blog with a critical eye. If you are espousing creationism, Intelligent Design creationism, the beauty of unthinking acceptance of your Lord and Master Jesus Christ or Mohammed or L. Ron Hubbard, or have a Bush in ’08 badge on your site, don’t bother. Really, you don’t want to draw my attention to you. You probably don’t like me, anyway.
There is a technical limitation. I manage my blogroll with my newsreader, so I can only see sites that have some kind of syndication feed. Most do, nowadays, but if you’ve got some obscure code you’re using to generate your blog, you might not. Static web pages also usually do not. Sorry, I just don’t have a good way around this right now.
Take a look at the current blogroll, and make sure you aren’t already on it. It’s so embarrassing to raise your hand and say “Me, me, me!” and discover that you were picked a long time ago. It would also be polite to check out a few of those other blogs while you’re skimming the list — the point of the blogroll is to send some traffic to other places, after all.
After leaping all those tremendous hurdles, leave a comment here, with a link to your blog. You can just type the url into your comment, or if you want to show off your amazing html skills, you can imbed a link, like so: <a href=”http://my.blog.url/”>My Blog!</a>. Easy! You might also want to describe what’s special about your blog, so other readers might be enticed to check it out. Regular readers or people already on my blogroll might be reading the comments to pick up interesting new blogs, too.
Write out a check for $100 and send it to… Uh, never mind. There are no catches to this, you don’t even have to link back to me. Just write good stuff.
As before, I make no promises to keep you on the blogroll, and in particular, I ruthlessly purge blogs that fail to update for over a month.
Now let’s hope the response isn’t quite as overwhelming as last time. Haven’t I already linked to most of the blogosphere already?
