Blogorama

Wow, it's been a couple of years since I last did a Blogorama post. Now that I'm around 250 feeds in my Bloglines, I think it's time to update here on some cool new-to-me blogs I've discovered in the last little while. And yes, it's time to trim the subscriptions a little.

• Whatever by John Scalzi. It's not really about science or libraries but Scalzi often does post about issues that interest me as a participant in the Internet reputation economy. Or lack thereof, in my case. A couple of really good recent posts in that vein are Fame or Lack Thereof and The Problem With 1,000 True Fans. They later is a pretty depressing analysis of how "easy" it is to convert reputation into cash.
  
  
• WoW! Wouter on the Web by Dutch librarian Wouter Gerritsma. Infrequent, but lots of good commentary on the way libraries could be.
  
  
• Digital Curation Blog. "Blog inspired by the Digital Curation Centre to discuss issues relating to the curation and long term preservation of digital science and research data." Excellent new blog on a topic libraries and librarians need to keep on top of.
  
  
• shimenawa by Peter Brantley, Executive Director of the Digital Library Federation. Commentary about where library collections and services are headed.
  
  
• Librarian in Red. "I am a Librarian at a governmental research and development aerospace laboratory. I find topics of information architecture and information usability very exciting. When I'm not being a library geek, I am a World of Warcraft geek/Star Wars geek/Dog lover. I am a geek onion." I am a geek onion. Classic!
  
  
• if:book is supposed to be about the future of the book, but really it's about the future of the transmission of culture. Coincidentally, the most recent post on Tex is dear to the heart of the geek onion in me.
  
  
• The Long Tail by Chris Anderson. By turns brilliant and frustrating it's well worth reading. Most recent post: Anderson actually thinks newspapers are doing relatively well!
  
  
• apophenia by danah boyd. Wide ranging commentary on the culture of the web. Best of here.
  
  
• Joho the Blog and Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. A bit like Chris Anderson, by turns frustrating and brilliant (though I'll admit, mostly less frustrating) commentary of the miscellaneousness of the culture we live in.
  
  
• Tools of Change for Publishing and O'Reilly FYI. Two blogs from tech publisher O'Reilly. The ToC blog is really interesting because you get to see a forward thinking publisher in the process of rethinking what publishing is.
  
  
• business|bytes|genes|molecules by Deepak Singh. Not too many blogs that cover the escience and science 2.0 bioinformatics scenes better than this one. But is it mmgb, ggmm, mgbm?
  
  
• Science-Based Medicine. A woo-free zone. Great posts on acupuncture and other so-called complimentary and alternative medical treatments.
  
  
• Open Reading Frame by Bill Hooker. Bill Hooker is at the forefront of re-imagining what scientific publishing could be.
  
  
• Science and Religion News by Salman Hameed.
  
  
• Michael Nielson, like Bill Hooker, is thinking hard about how science could be communicated in a reputation economy. Cool recent post on collaboration.
  
  
• Coding Horror by Jeff Atwood. Amusing and insightful commentary on the life of a coder.
  
  
• Shtetl-Optimized by Scott Aaronson. We all need more theoretical computer science blogs in our blogrolls.
  
  
• Scott Rosenberg's Wordyard. Rosenberg is the author of Dreaming in Code, one of my favourite recent books. His next one will be about blogs and bloggers.

And one for the fun of it -- I just love Pulp of the Day!

So, who out there should be blogging but isn't yet? C'mon, you know who you are...Stacy, Jen, Tim?

Science Blogging Conference: Closing thoughts

(I know it's weird to have closing thoughts before the middle thoughts, ie. session summaries, but it's my blog and I'll do it this way if I want to ;-)

As I said in my first post, the conference was truly a great experience. The sessions were mostly pretty good, sure, but it was the company that transformed the conference from good to great. I can't recall meeting so many committed, engaged people in one place at one time, all of whom were so clearly doing something they were totally passionate about.

So, I thought I'd take a moment to point you all to the blogs of some of the people I met for the first time at the conference. This is unlikely to be a complete list, as my memory is imperfect.

I encourage you all to check out their blogs and visit for a while.

In no particular order:

• Jean-Claude Bradley
  
• Bora Zivkovic
  
• James Hrynyshyn
  
• Peter Etnoyer
  
• Martin Rundkvist
  
• Tom Levenson
  
• Ryan Somma
  
• Virginia Hughes
  
• Bill Hooker
  
• Molly Keener
  
• Salman Hameed
  
• Deepak Singh
  
• Eric Roston
  
• Euan Adie
  
• Karen James
  
• Josee-Nadia Drouin & Pascal Lapointe
  
• Shelley Batts
  
• Mona Albano
  
• Jamie DePolo
  
• Vedran Vucic
  

And, of course, tons of other non-bloggers too! I really hope to make it to the conference again next year, to renew all these acquaintances and to forge new connections.

BTW, if you're a blogger and you're reading this and you remember that we spoke at some length during the conference but I haven't listed you here, please leave a note in the comments. Really, my memory is faulty and I've just forgotten. On the other hand, if you're on the list and don't remember talking to me, well, insert humourous remark here.

Online participation page for links to session videos.

scienceblogging.com

SocialRank blog aggregators

Referrer logs are an excellent source of information. Not only do they tell me who's talking about me and what's popular or useful from what I've written, they also tell can give me a heads up on new devopements in the blogosphere. A case in point is the dribble of links I've gotten over the last couple of weeks from a new site called The Library Shelf:

Are you a librarian? Each day, The Library Shelf identifies the top 15 librarian stories and blogs of the day.

We do this by monitoring the buzz of the Librarian blog community. So YOU decide what's important.

We use SocialRank software to monitor each of the best librarian sites and determine today's hottest articles and bloggers in the field.

This is done by analyzing how sites and users link, connect, and discuss each other's content. Add a touch of math and what we have is a powerful filter into the hottest stories of the day.

Now you can find better librarian stories, learn more, and get updated... much faster and easier than before

It seems like a pretty interesting service, one that SociaRank has replicated in a bunch of other blogging communities, mostly business, hobby, lifestyle or technology focused. Each day they highlight the top posts and the blogs that are the fastest growing, attention-wise. So far I've found The Library Shelf and a few other of the communities fairly interesting and useful in helping me keep up.

Here are some of the pros and cons:

• Pro: It does increase my personal serendipity factor by highlighting posts from blogs that I don't follow
  
• Pro: Related to the above, the threshold for "important post" seems pretty low right now so it is possible for it to surface stuff from beyond the most popular blogs
  
• Pro: It's another measure of ranking/popularity
  
  
  
• Con: It's not clear exactly what blogs they cover and right now it seems to be a fairly small number
  
• Con: Using comments and links as the main measure of importance is a bit dubious without any human relevance checking.
  
• Con: It doesn't cycle that quickly as many posts seem to linger on the list for days and days
  
• Con: It's another measure of ranking/popularity

Some of the other communities I'll be following:

• AllNightCoder: programming
  
• LearningSignal: elearning
  
• MathBloggers

Check out these two posts for more communities on feminism, atheism, Microsoft, Oracle, Ruby on rails, toys, pop culture, parenting, Java, Apple, Flash, cats, Python, cars, Second Life and more.

Thanks, PRISM!

Given my post from a few days ago, you wouldn't think I'd be grateful to the PRISM guys for anything.

Well, you're wrong. As it happens, a few other blogs have linked to my PRISM post and, through the wonders of Technorati, I've discovered a few new blogs!

• Journalology by Matt Hodgkinson of BioMed Central.
  
• Peter Murry-Rust's blog: A Scientist and the Web
  
• Virtually Shocking -- The Cardiac Electrophysiology Blog by Brock Tice

Bora Zivkovic and Peter Suber also linked to the post, but them I know already.

Publishers must blog!

Michael Cairns of PersonaNonData has a great post of the if-you-can't-beat-em-join-ed variety:, Publishers Must Blog:

If you can’t beat them join them: Developing a social media strategy that encompasses blogging should be a foundation of all publishing house marketing and promotion plans. I have mentioned before (in relationship to book reviews) that I am less convinced of the value of typical marketing programs supporting book promotion. My macro view above can only be mitigated by joining the new media fray and developing networks of interested parties that can nurture, support and perhaps develop content that you produce as a publishing house. As market segments evolve, I think they will become narrower and more defined and publishers that support communities (via social) must be able to participate in these communities in a meaningful way in order to be successful. This is already the case on computer book publishing.

It's quite a long post with a lot of good points, so it's well worth checking out in it's entirety. In fact, Michael makes a lot of points that are relevant to why anyone or any organization with any public presence would want to blog:

As I thought about the theme of the panel meeting, my thought process mirrored the approach I took and the benefits I saw in establishing a blog.

• Blogging gave me an opportunity to experiment with new technology
  
• I became a publisher/content producer and, as traffic increases, one with responsibility to an audience
  
• Develop a personality beyond a ‘resume’ or existing professional reputation
  
• As popularity increases, the blog becomes a center of a growing network of interest
  
• Expands a professional network: who knew there were as many people with shared views and perspectives?

Libraries, library directors, subject librarians, department chairs, profs, deans, presidents, research vps -- I think that Michael's points would be well worth bringing up to a wide variety of actors in the university environment.

Fiveblogs

It seems that there's a meme growing out there. List five non-library blogs that you read. There's a mixture of ones that are still work related and ones that are just for fun, and I'll keep that mix for my list.

1. Scobleizer and its companion vblog The Schoble Show I'll count as one. These are great blogs, filled with tons of cool techie stuff, mostly not all that relevant to libraries but still fun. The latest bunch of video wonderfullness is a tour of Microsoft Research. The full one-hour vid is here.
   
   
2. Persona Non Data by Michael Cairns is a blog I've only just discovered. He covers a lot of general publishing related news with lots of commentary too. Cairns was president of Bowker for a while. More on this blog in the near future (literally, he says foreshadowingly).
   
   
3. The Yourdon Report is by famed software engineering author Ed Yourdon. I've read lots of his books over the years and he never fails to hit the right note. If there can be said to be something called popular software engineering literature, Ed Yourdon practically invented it. Take a look at his latest post on the $100 laptop project.
   
   
4. The ScienceBlogs combined feed is flat-out the most useful non-library feed that I read. Want to learn something about how scientists tick? Most of the best science bloggers on the planet all in one place? This is the place.
   
   
5. Time for a fun one. Via PND, I discovered that Pete Townshend has a blog! The Who have always been my absolute favourite rock band and I've followed Townshend's solo career since the min-70s.

Doing this list also made me notice that I haven't done a regular Blogorama post in a while. Maybe later this week.

First noticed on Walt at Random.

Blogorama

It's been a while since I've done one of these posts, and it seems that I've added a whole ton of new feeds. The interesting thing is that I've added a few library blogs, which I haven't done in a while. As usual, any suggestions for good library or scitech blogs are appreciated.

• Reviews.com News is a new blog for the ACM Computing Reviews service. It looks like it'll be pretty interesting, especially since they'll be highlighting new Hot Topics essays like this one on Game Theory & Electronic Markets. Organizational blogs like this one seem to go one of two ways -- either they catch on and become good sources or they seem to lose interest internally and get less interesting over time. Here's hoping the the Computing Reviews folk fall firmly in the former category.
  
• Search Engine Land -- lots of posts about the search engine industry. It'll be interesting in a few months whether I end up following this blog, Search Engine Watch's blog, or both.
  
• Brian Gray's newish blog, Are you 2.0 yet? is an interesting look at L2 from a scitech library perspective.
  
• Library 2.0: An Academic's Perspective by Laura Cohen offers occasional thoughful & provocative essays on various issues where academic librarianship & L2 collide. Kind of like a review journal, in a way.
  
• LibraryZen blog -- the blog that compliments the wonderful new search engine, LISZEN.
  
• Time's Eye on Science -- I'm always willing to try new general interest science blogs, and this looks like a good one. These do tend to have a short life expectency on my feed reader, though, so it remains to be seen if it'll keep my interest long term.
  
• Center for Science Writings Blog is by John Horgan's institution, so it should be good. Not too frequent posting so far.
  
• Galactic Interactions -- Rob Knop's blog, mixing science, science studies, politics and other stuff.
  
• Adventures in Applied Math is a good new-to-me CS blog.
  
• Science Books Blog. Just what it sounds like. I'm hoping that this stays a long term, vital source of commentary and recommendations.
  
• Knowing and Doing -- A blog by computer scientist Eugene Wallingford. A good blog that gives real insight into the life of an academic cs prof.
  
• Egg -- Like a Bird's Egg is, as I've mentioned before, Chris Leonard's new blog. Chris is a former editor at Elsevier, now at Phys Math Central.
  
• Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk and Science Musings Blog are two philosophy of science blogs. I always like to add a couple of thoseas they keep us all honest.

Blogorama

It's been a while since I reported on what's newish in my bloglines subs:

• ScienceBlogs -- now up to 49 blogs, I get the feed that aggregates them all. Often over 100 posts a day, it's both overwhelming and indispensible. The range and variety of commentary on both scientific and other issues is stupendous. The only problem is that I really don't have as much of a fix on the personality of the individual blogs as I normally would. Some of the newer ones are still only very vaguely imprinted on my consciousness.
  
• Schneier on Security -- great blog covering security & IP issues.
  
• Cosmic Variance -- "Cosmic Variance is a group blog by five people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists." Good blog covering a very wide range of scitech & other topics. Always something worth reading.
  
• Rationally Speaking by Massimo Pigliucci is a philosophy of science blog, covering a wide range of non-science topics too. Seems like a natural for the next wave of ScienceBlogs migrations.
  
• Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog -- "Science and Engineering: Innovation, Research, Education and Economics." Wide-ranging blog, always covering interesting stuff.
  
• Applied Abstractions -- "Technology, strategy, IT management and miscellany." Good links & commentary, like Why Professors Should Blog.
  
• O'Reilly Radar -- I've tried for a while to find a good feed from O'Reilly. They all seem to crap out after a while. This one has lots of good posts from various staffers, including Tim O'Reilly himself. One of Tim's recent ones is Quality of Book Digitization.
  
• Rants of a feminist engineer and Absinthe -- two good blogs by women in scitech fields.
  
• The Laughing Librarian and A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette -- because we all need a good laugh.
  
• The Linda Hall Library Weblog -- not that much activity yet, but potentially interesting.
  
• CRITICAL MASS -- "the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors." Coverage of the publishing industry, with the occasional highly relevant post such as Using Books to Get Women Into Science
  
• Galleycat.com: a blog about books and publishing. Similar to Critical Mass but more light-hearted with more coverage of genre fiction.

It's notable that I haven't added too many new library links in the last several months. Mostly this is because I'm pretty well covered with those and wanted to beef up my scitech blog list. There's a lot of the A-List library blogs I don't read regularly, so I should probably look to adding a few of those. As well, I really haven't taken the time yet to go through Walt's big list of the Great Middle to see what catches my fancy.

Update: Added link to O'Reilly Radar.

Blogorama

Some blogs I've added to my bloglines list recently:

• Library Juice is back as a blog
  
• Information Literacy Weblog has also reappeared after a longish absence.
  
• CogSci Librarian: a new entry (for me at least, the blog's been going since Dec 04) into the scitech library blogosphere
  
• Science And Politics and The Magic School Bus by Bora Zivkovic (aka coturnix), the latter blog being about science education. Both well worth checking out.
  
• Eric.Weblog() is about the computing industry, from an insider perspective
  
• USACM Tech Policy Weblog: "Tracking technology policy issues for the USACM, ACM, and computing communities."
  
• Computing Research Policy Blog, from the Computing Research Association, along the same lines as the ACM blog above.
  
• Computational Complexity: a good one on math & CS. Part of my effort to try and keep as close a watch on the science blogosphere as the biblioblogosphere.
  
• Good Math, Bad Math: helping us all separate the real math from the lies and damn lies.
  
• FemaleCSGradStudent: exactly what it says.

Further suggestions always welcome, especially for good engineering blogs which I seem to be lacking.