The winners of the first Research Blogging Awards were announced today, and I was very pleasantly surprised to find that this blog was named the “Best Blog — Chemistry, Physics, or Astronomy.” I knew that I was nominated– I was one of the judges, and while I abstained from voting on my own blog, I did see it in the list with many other excellent blogs. Given that research blogging is only a small part of what I do, I didn’t expect to win at all.
(In the manner of such awards, I now feel guilty for not having done any ResearchBlogging posts in ages, so I’ve queued one up for tomorrow morning, on the cooling of a “macroscopic” object to its quantum ground state.)
Of course, the big honor, and the big money, goes to Ed Yong of Not Exactly Rocket Science, who won both Research Blog of the Year and Blog Post of the Year. Ed wins a cool $1,000 (some less satisfyingly round number of pounds or euros), and it’s a well-deserved honor. (I get $50, which I will send to DonorsChoose, ScienceBlogs’s charity of choice.)
The list of honorees and nominees is a long one, though, and you could do a whole lot worse than to spend a few hours reading through the blogs on the list. There’s some really good, high-quality writing about science out there on the Internet.
Congratulations! I was wondering why no award was given in the Computer Science, Engineering, or Mathematics category? I can think of several great blogs in this category that cover interesting research. Is it because the blog is supposed to adopt the research blogging logo when they write technical posts? If so, then I think this might be a problem because the discussion in CompSci and Math tends to be ahead of the publication curve due to the importance of arXiv and conferences in those fields. It may also be that the bloggers in these fields are not aware of ResearchBlogging, in which case we should inform them before the next awards.
They didn’t end up with enough nominations in the CS/ Math category– I think there was only one blog nominated.
They do accept arxiv papers now (at least, there’s a checkbox for “this is a preprint” now– I haven’t tried posting about anything arxiv-only yet). There hasn’t been as much adoption of RB in the physical and mathematical sciences as in the life sciences, though– there’s a whole hep-theory type community out there that blogs a lot about research, but doesn’t participate in ResearchBlogging, for example.
I read Not exactly rocket sciences for a long time,. its clever, well written and great way of sharing knowledge, I hope you blog will get more and more posts around the subjects of your 3 P’s