Just a quick reminder that the San Francisco party to celebrate one million comments on ScienceBlogs is tomorrow, Friday, September 26, starting at 9:00 PM at Tonic, 2360 Polk Street (at the corner of Union). I’ll be there, as will the brothers Bleiman, Craig McClain, Josh Rosenau, and Razib. If you show up, you’ll be there, too!
Also, don’t forget that until the end of September you can still enter the drawing for a fabulous trip to New York City, including a dinner with your favorite ScienceBlogger.
Category Archives: Blogospheric science
Come celebrate copious commenting!
If you make your way to this blog by way of the ScienceBlogs homepage, you may have noticed the “Comments” ticker clicking ever closer to 1,000,000. Our benevolent overlords at Seed Media Group have decided that crossing the millionth comment mark is cause for celebration, and they would like to offer you ScienceBlogs readers (whether you comment or merely lurk) a piece of the action.
Do jokes reveal something about who you’re talking to?
On April Fool’s Day, our local Socrates Café had an interesting discussion around the question of what makes something funny. One observation that came up repeatedly was that most jokes seem aimed at particular audiences — at people who share particular assumptions, experiences, and contexts with the person telling the joke. The expectation is that those “in the know” will recognize what’s funny, and that those who don’t see the humor are failing to find the funny because they’re not in possession of the crucial knowledge or insight held by those in the in-group. Moreover, the person telling the joke seems effectively to assert his or her membership in that in-group. People in the discussion probed the question of whether there was anything that could be counted on to be universally funny; our tentative answer was, “Probably not.”
With this hunch about joking in hand, I wanted to take a closer look at a particular joke and what it might convey.
A dialogue on pseudonymity, personae, and interpersonal relations in the blogosphere.
Janet D. Stemwedel: Hey, can we talk about pseudonymous blogging?
Dr. Free-Ride: Haven’t you already written a bunch of posts about that?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Yeah, but the blogosphere seems to be discussing it again.
Dr. Free-Ride: You know I only work on Fridays, right?
Janet D. Stemwedel: Get your pseudonymous butt in gear and help me have a proper dialogue!
Enough is enough. I quit.
It’s time to unplug from the ScienceBorg.
Why more racial diversity in the science blogosphere would be a good thing
Since Alice and Sciencewoman and DrugMonkey and Razib are discussing it (and because Zuska has discussed it before, including in real life), I wanted to say something about my reaction to the observation that science blogosphere in general, and ScienceBlogs in particular, seems pretty white:
I’d noticed that, too! And I’d like it a lot if there were more racial diversity among the science bloggers and the blogging scientists.
There would be some clear benefits to achieving more diversity — but there might also be costs, and looking at who would bear those costs seems pretty important.
A moment of navel-gazing about writing a science blog.
All the cool kids were doing this particular round of navel–gazing yesterday and the day before, while I was either dreadfully ill and out of commission or somewhat better and working. (Today was also quite full of work stuff.) However, it’s not an unimportant set of questions, and possibly you’re curious about the answers, so let’s give it a go:
1. Why do you consider this blog a science blog?
Rules, community standards, and policing: Casey Luskin and ResearchBlogging.
You may have been following the saga of intelligent design proponent Casey Luskin’s use of the ResearchBlogging.org “Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research” icon in a way that didn’t conform to the official guidelines for its use.
The short description on ResearchBlogging’s mission says:
Research Blogging helps you locate and share academic blog posts about peer-reviewed research. Bloggers use our icon to identify their thoughtful posts about serious research, and those posts are collected here for easy reference.
The guidelines for using the spiffy icon include registering with ResearchBlogging, something Luskin did not do at first in the post for which he used the icon. However, Luskin made changes that, in his estimation, brought his post into compliance with the guidelines. Did he succeed? And, is there any effective way for a community to enforce compliance to the spirit of its rules, rather than simply to the letter?
Blogroll Amnesty Day
By way of Abel and DrugMonkey (among others), I see that today is Blogroll Amnesty Day. Jon Swift has the must-read post on the origins of the day and what it means now:
The idea that links are the capital of the blogosphere seems so obvious that you would think an economist like Atrios of Eschaton would have realized it long ago. And as he is a progressive who has accumulated quite a bit of link wealth, you might also think he would be in favor of redistributing some of that wealth instead of just letting it trickle down. So when he announced last year that he was declaring February 3 Blogroll Amnesty Day, and other bloggers followed suit, I assumed he meant that he was opening his blogroll up to the masses…
When February 3 rolled around, many bloggers discovered to their horror that instead of adding new blogs to his blogroll he was throwing many off, including some bloggers who were his longtime friends. Blogroll Amnesty Day, it turned out, was a very Orwellian concept. Instead of granting amnesty to others he was granting amnesty to himself not to feel bad for hurting others feelings. Though Atrios has stubbornly refused to acknowledge that he made a mistake, some bloggers who initially joined him, backtracked. Markos of the Daily Kos instituted a second blogroll that consisted of random links from diarists. PZ Myers of Pharyngula now has real Blogroll Amnesty Days where he invites anyone who has blogrolled him to join his blogroll. And in the wake of the bloodletting quite a number of smaller blogs, like my friend skippy the bush kangaroo, changed their own blogroll policies and now link more freely to others.
Ironically, Blogroll Amnesty Day had a net positive effect for the blogosphere as a whole. I discovered a number of great blogs and made new friends and I am sure that is true for others as well. And so instead of remembering February 3 as a day that will live in infamy, let’s turn this day into a celebration of the power of smaller blogs. Let’s recognize that building an inclusive community of diverse voices is what the blogosphere should be about, not creating a new elite to replace the old mainstream media elite.