While I’m running unrelated articles head-on into each other, two other things that caught my eye recently were Sabine Hossenfelder’s thoughts on scientific celebrities (taking off from Lawrence Krauss’s defense of same) and Megan Garber’s piece on “attention policing”, spinning off that silliness about a badly exposed photo of a dress that took the Internet… Continue reading Celebrities and Attention Police
Category: Blogs
Read the Whole Thing
Jon “Men Who Stare at Goats” Ronson has a new book coming out, and has been promoting it with excerpts in major newspapers, most notably the New York Times Magazine and the Guardian. In these, he tracks down people whose lives were wrecked by massive public shaming campaigns over idiotic things they wrote on social… Continue reading Read the Whole Thing
Division of Labor in Science Communication
Paige Brown Jarreau, who blogs at From the Lab Bench is in the throes of writing her dissertation about science blogging, and plowing through a lot of interview data. She’s sharing some of the process on the blog, and a lot more on Twitter, where it’s prompted a good deal of discussion. One of the… Continue reading Division of Labor in Science Communication
Social Media Are Social
I didn’t see this before yesterday’s post about Twitter, but over at SciLogs, Kirk Englehardt gets evangelical, offering a very chipper list of “Ten Reasons for Academic Researchers to Use Social Media.” I’ll just put the item headers here, though each of these has a more complete description, with links to lots of other stuff:… Continue reading Social Media Are Social
Top Blogging of 2010, Then and Now
The final bit of meta-blogging I’ll do this weekend is another look at what survives from past years. Unfortunately, when National Geographic took over, they broke our Google Analytics access, so I can’t see blog stats from before mid-2012 any more. I do, however, have this old post listing the top posts of 2010, traffic-wise,… Continue reading Top Blogging of 2010, Then and Now
What Survives from 2013’s Blogging?
Continuing the weekend theme of meta-blogging, one of the questions I’ve occasionally wondered about in doing top-posts lists for a given year is the problem of a bias against recency– that is, that posts put up toward the end of the year are inherently at a disadvantage because they’ve had less time to integrate up… Continue reading What Survives from 2013’s Blogging?
Top Blogging Actually Done in 2014
As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about what draws the most traffic here, I went through and pulled out the top 20 posts from the blog (by traffic) for the calendar year 2014 that were first published in 2014. Numbers after the links are the fraction of the total pageviews for the year that each… Continue reading Top Blogging Actually Done in 2014
The Golden Age of Blogging Was 2010
When I was writing up the state of blogging post last weekend, I thought about pulling together a Top Ten Posts thing, but didn’t have time. also, Google analytics moved a bunch of stuff since the last time I used it, so I had a hard time locating the right options. Having tracked it down,… Continue reading The Golden Age of Blogging Was 2010
Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light
Rhett Allain has a list of 5 Things Every Human Should Know About Light, to tie in with the International Year of Light, and it’s a good list with lots of .gifs. Of course, there are some gaps, so let me offer some additional things that everyone ought to know about light: — Light Is… Continue reading Three More Things Every Human Should Know About Light
The State of Blogging 2015
I was going to let Andrew Sullivan’s departure from blogging pass without comment– I haven’t been a regular reader of his stuff in around ten years, after all– but a couple of mysterious guys in dark suits showed up at the house and pointed out that as someone who started blogging in 2002, I would… Continue reading The State of Blogging 2015