The Guardian is asking for recommendations, but they’ve also got a good list of their favorite science blogs that is a good starting point for anyone.

This is terrible news: one of the very best blogs on Scienceblogs, or anywhere, Effect Measure, is shutting down. It’s a sad day; it was one of the blogs I turned to every day, and especially on Sundays for the Freethinker Sermonette. Revere has made a personal decision to move on to other ventures, which is good for him but deprives me of some good writing.

He has passed the public health torch to another blog, The Pump Handle, which is good…and also cruel. He set the bar very high with good writing, humanity, and progressive values, and now this new blog on Sb will have to try to meet those high standards. Ouch. It’s good to have goals, but they should be reachable, you know.

I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye on The Pump Handle and hope they can fill the gap Revere has left here.

Then you’ll like the new addition to Scienceblogs, Myrmecos.

I have to say, Needs More Squid, but then that’s true of all of the scienceblogs. I guess arthropods are almost as cool, though, so I’ll give the blog my blessing.

Another mobile element has been slotted into the SciBorg matrix: everyone say hello to The Thoughtful Animal, a blog on animal cognition. So far, Needs More Squid, but it could be interesting.

I run a blog, not an open forum, and I’m reminded once again why I prefer the former.

The Richard Dawkins site is revising their forum. This substantial change is causing a great deal of unwarranted anxiety — people are unhappy (which is fair enough) and complaining, and many are flocking to a new open forum, which is also just fine. They’re also complaining to me, which is odd. So I’ll say a few words.

• First and foremost, it is not my site, and it is not your site. It is Richard Dawkins’ site. People have lost sight of the fact that Dawkins has his own views on how the site should function, and he has the right and even the obligation to try and shape it to his goals. If you don’t like it, fine, go somewhere else. I know, that sounds so cavalier, but that’s the reality of it all. Richard spends the money to keep it going. He’s the boss.

• There has been a lot of vilification of Josh Timonen going on, which does not win my sympathy. Josh is a good guy, and he’s neck-deep in work for the RDF — not just the richarddawkins.net site, and not just the forum, which only represents about a quarter of the daily visits to the site overall. Yet the forum represents most of the drama and trouble in maintaining the whole business. If it’s not reflecting Dawkins’ vision, and if it’s a headache to maintain, you have to appreciate why they would think revising it would be a smart idea.

• I’ve been active in forums on the web in the past, and I’ve also played a role as a moderator. It takes a lot of work to keep a forum afloat. Every one I know of follows one of two paths: a slow decline into quiet apathy, or a rapid growth in membership and activity which leads to an eventual implosion into chaos, acrimony, and drama as disparate interests try to tug the forum in different directions. The forums at richarddawkins.net should not have competing interests, but only one: that of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. I think the recent changes are intended, in part, to remind participants of that.

• The forums are not going away, but they are going to change in character. That hurts if you have an attachment to the old forums, but this is reality, and reality is dynamic and change happens all the time. Adapt or die. Who knows, the new format may be even better than the old — try it!

• You can always just come to Pharyngula and chat here. Or any of the other atheist sites on the net. The community is not going away and is not harmed by a change in one outlet for its expression, and if it is, then it’s not much of a community, now is it?

So, move on. Adapt. Express yourselves wherever. Check out the new RDF discussions when they emerge later. This is not a crisis, it’s a change.

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Richard Dawkins expresses his opinion.

One very weird thing about this whole contretemps is how people are treating Josh like some evil Rasputin. Josh and Richard are on very good terms, and Richard has clear opinions on how the site should be run — and there is no doubt about who is in charge.

WordPress gave Michael Hawkins his blog back!

The Times Online has posted a list of science blogs of various sorts, which I was inclined to endorse since they did include me, and also some blogs I hadn’t seen before — I am enchanted by 2d goggles, and want to spend the rest of the day reading the archives — but then I got to the end of the list and … Anthony Watts? Crank weatherman and climate change denialist? That’s an anti-science blog, sorry. Now I’m a little embarrassed to be on it.

I note that the commenters on that site are similarly dismayed at the lack of discrimination in their final choice.

I’m not going to get into the ongoing civility wars. They were prompted by the announcement that the Nature Network has passed the landmark of 50,000 comments — congratulations, and that’s very good — and various comments within that thread, combined with Greg Laden’s helpful addition of more incindiary agents, has blown up nicely into an interesting and sometimes acrimonious discussion.

I’ll just point out, though, that it’s silly to use comment numbers as an indicator of success of social networking. The endless thread alone, which is almost entirely free-form chit-chat and unabashed social glue for the community here, has somewhere north of 20,000 comments; maybe Sven can extrapolate to when that one thread will exceed Nature Network’s accomplishment. I can also tell you that Pharyngula currently has a grand total of 897,837 comments. I haven’t been paying attention to that parameter, but we should hit a million comments at this one blog sometime this year.

I don’t give a damn about civility. I let people say whatever; my primary criterion for cutting people off is whether they’re boring/obsessive/persistently stupid. If you want to fire up lots of lively discussion and encourage expression of multiple viewpoints, the rule should be hands off — not fussing over ‘tone’ (a word becoming about as distasteful as ‘framing’), not worrying about whether manners should dictate what is allowed to be posted. It does make for a rather Darwinian commenting environment, and some people are harshly self-culled…but the failures here are largely the fragile flowers who need their self-esteem propped up before they can express their opinions, and I don’t miss them at all. All you regulars can take pride in the fact that you are the strong survivors, possessing robust egos and good solid voices, who can handle the challenge of an ungentle tone.

Which ain’t much of an accomplishment, so don’t get too cocky.

There is lots of good stuff at Nature Network, but it’s a little weird to regard comment numbers as one of them. Or to try to correlate a good commenting environment with civility, whatever the hell that means to someone.

That’s what I must conclude from his recent post which is the outline for my entire damned blog. I may have to mockingly and provocatively respond, followed by promises of escalation of further actions of an obnoxious nature, culminating in outrageous climax that will trigger denunciations and many letters to the editor.