Aug
Adding more blogs to Scienceblogging.org
This site works by collecting groups of science blogs. Since there are thousands of science blogs, there’s no way the site could function if we collected them one-by-one. But we think it’s important to have a way to add new groups.
Bloggers can and do form their own groups all the time. Some of them are temporary, like Blog Carnivals, and others are permanent, like ScienceBlogs, or Field of Science, or many others. We’re interested in both types! We already aggregate science blog carnivals, but we’re looking for more.
Adding more blog groups is a bit trickier. How do we decide which groups to include? We want to be comprehensive, but not so overwhelming that the site takes forever to load. We don’t want to waste precious front page space with groups that are abandoned or rarely updated. We want to make sure the groups we include are really collections of science blogs.
I’d like this post to be a place where we come up with a good way to decide how and whether to add new groups of science blogs. But even defining a science blog can be hard. I tried googling “defining a science blog” but came up with nothing. I guess it’s up to me to start. Feel free to offer corrections/amendments in the comments.
A Science Blog:
- Discusses science research, principles, philosophy, teaching, history, news, or other fields related to science
- Is not required to always discuss science
- Studiously avoids pseudoscience, anti-science, and denialism–except to critique them
- Strives for accuracy, and corrects mistakes when they are pointed out
- Does not plagiarize or engage in other unethical behavior
- Discloses any conflicts of interests, especially financial ones
How does that sound? Again, I encourage you to offer amendments in the comments, and I’ll update them here as need be.
Next, we need to establish criteria for admitting a new group of science blogs. Here are a few concerns:
- The group should consist only of science blogs
- With a few exceptions, a blog group should not include blogs that are already included in other groups on our site
- The blog group needs to have one RSS feed that aggregates posts from all its blogs in reverse-chronological order
- The RSS feed should link directly to blog posts, not to some intermediate site. The feed shouldn’t include anything that’s not a blog post — like comments, etc.
- The feed should be regularly updated. (We may need to come up with a general rule, like if it’s not updated at least 3 times a day, you probably want to form a bigger group before being included on the site)
Anything else? Again, let us know in the comments.
For the moment, Bora, Anton, and I will be making the actual decisions on which groups to admit, but we’re striving to be inclusive and comprehensive. Ultimately we may need a more formal way to decide whether or not to add a group. We may also need to come up with a system for removing groups that no longer work for this site.
Here’s where we open it up for comments. Feel free to suggest new groups, amendments to the criteria for including a group, and suggestions on how to administer this site in the long run. We look forward to hearing what you have to say!
[Update August 23: Removed authorship requirement and added conflict-of-interest statement]
Can not a science blog also be written by an historian of science, a philosopher of science, a sociologist of science, a person in STS, etc.?
Good point, Michael. Maybe we just need to remove the authorship statement entirely. Or maybe we just want to exclude certain occupations, e.g. marketing/sales/PR? Or maybe we don’t want to exclude even them, provided they meet the other requirements.
I’d suggest removing it entirely and instead add something along the lines “must not endorse a certain product/opinion due to a financial relationship”… because in the end, otherwise you’ve got everyone in the authorship statement …
Sam, I see where you are going with it. But what about science illustrators? Would we be endorsing a certain product (our own work) due to a finiancial relationship?
Sam, I’d say even that is a little strict. For example, that would exclude someone like Carl Zimmer from plugging his own books. Maybe we ought to just say they should disclose any potential conflicts of interest?
“Should disclose conflicts of interest, particularly financial ones”, maybe.
That’s a fair point. Perhaps there should be something about a) the financial relationship being clear and b) something about what kind of product/opinion we’re talking about?
… and I guess things change if the product is their own.
Any thoughts on adding independent bloggers in the future? Are unaffiliated bloggers officially out in the cold now?
I guess we unaffiliated folks can still have our stuff appear under the “ResearchBlogging.org” column . . . while random pictures of kittens wearing mittens get aggregated if they happen to appear on a network . . .
“Is written by a scientist, science student, science journalist, or interested layperson”
I think anyone that’s not part of the first three groups could be a part of the last group. Using myself as an easy example, my job has absolutely nothing at all to do with science, but I enjoy reading, writing, and learning about science no less. I don’t think this point really makes much of a difference as long as the next point is true:
“Discusses science research, principles, philosophy, teaching, history, news, or other fields related to science”
Sam’s suggestion of “must not endorse a certain product/opinion due to a financial relationship” is a good one. After all, the whole PepsiGate deal is part of why this site is here now, is it not? Although this point may get a little tricky. Where do you draw the line? What about blogs that review a product or service and receive some sort of compensation for said review? Does that qualify as a reason for removal? Even if the review was negative or at least not positive? What if that blog is part of a network? There are a lot of possibilities, but it will be difficult to create a de-facto rule about endorsement vs. financial relationships. Not even mentioning other forms of compensation.
I think what you have is a great start and you’re headed in the right direction. Looking forward to seeing how the site develops.
This kind of site really needs a way to sort posts by subject area. The channels on the SB.com front page aren’t ideal (the Scientopia categories look a little better to me), but something like that is definitely necessary. Blog groups should, ideally, have multiple RSS feeds, one for each channel. Then, all the “technology” channels from different sites could be pooled together. Different conventions at different blog groups would be a bit of a headache, but I think it would be manageable.
With blog posts organized even roughly by subject, single-author independent blogs would be easier to incorporate. A blog operated by a single person might not update very frequently, and so would be a dead weight on the Scienceblogging.org front page as it’s organized now, but with subject-based channels, their posts tagged “environment” would show up under “environment”, and everything would be shiny.
I think I ought to clarify a bit:
My “kittens wearing mittens” complaint above wasn’t sour grapes on my part (I don’t post often enough, and won’t be posting again for long enough, that I don’t care about my own traffic). The problem is that as it looks right now, the Scienceblogging.org front page just isn’t that usable. Organizing the blog posts by their point of origin is, philosophically, at least a little odd: isn’t the idea of bloggers off in their separate little enclaves just what we’re trying to fight against here? More importantly, though, it makes finding something I might care about much more difficult than that should be. If I want to read the latest on the Hauser investigation, I don’t want to scroll through eleventy-nine different blog networks to see which have something relevant. Not only are all the bloggers on each network posting about other things and getting in the way, but on top of that, a hefty chunk of content on each network will inevitably be “kittens with mittens” or “OMG, the guy in front of me at my Locally Owned Independent Coffee Shop tried to order a ‘venti’ and the barista totally slugged him out”. I have nothing against any of that, in principle, but when each network has five slots, it pushes the serious stuff off the screen.
To piggyback a bit on what Blake Stacey said, maybe a widget with a #hashtag or keyword search on twitter may be beneficial.
Example:
The interwebz explode with a topic like PepsiGate or #oilspill. The people that control the site have the widget search twitter for mentions of whatever the hot button issue of the hour/day is. That way, you’ll see discussion and links to new blog posts and news articles live as they happen.
Doing great work around here so far!
I like AmoebaMike’s idea! You could have a sidebar widget called, say, “Trending science topics”.
I like Blake’s idea about aggregating by topic though I can see that turning into a LOT of work… though if I weren’t going on holiday in a couple of days I’d volunteer. Great idea.
(Also, I like AmoebaMike’s idea too, probably easier to do too)
[also posted at http://wordmunger.com/?p=1389&cpage=1#comment-90000
Scienceblogging as a master aggregator is a wonderful thing, but it may spell doom for unaffiliated bloggers. Granted, it would be a lot more work to sort out which independent bloggers to include than it is to build a site for existing groups. I understand that. Nonetheless, one can’t help feeling as if a giant iron door is slowly swinging shut, and that the widespread assumption is that if you were any good at science blogging and actually worth reading, you would already have joined one of the science blog groups.
It could turn out that legit science bloggers who aren’t brand names and who aren’t on the scienceblogging page may find themselves slowly starved of page views and forced to fold up shop.If scienceblogging takes off like it should, I expect to see my page views start to dwindle.
Sam W:
Manually aggregating by topic would be like trying to sieve the output of a firehose . . . but if the blog networks each had their own separate “channel” feeds, and if scienceblogging.org could sort incoming posts by tags, I bet an automated system would work decently well. And, again, this would help independent single-author blogs be part of the aggregator community: their posts wouldn’t show up under the lists for the big blog networks, but they’d appear in the “latest physics posts” or “latest ecology/environment posts” feeds.
Obvs you couldn’t sort every incoming post, but first you’d have to set up catagories & work through different tagging systems and feeds. That alone would be quite a bit of work. Going through networks without separate feeds, identifying their tags, setting up different catagories for incoming posts… it’d take not only sorting through but also a certain amount of programming know-how (which is beyond even my imagination)…
While it’s a cool idea, it’s probably not feasible any time soon (?)
I think aggregating by topic is feasible, if you provide a registration service for individual blogs. Naturally, you’d probably need at least someone assigned to each topic in order to vet the individual registrations (although this might be too much of an undertaking). I think best division would be according to broad subject areas e.g. biology, chemistry, physics, linguistics etc. Then, for each subject area, the role of editor(s) would be to make sure said blog is actually relevant. In addition to this, you could adopt Research Blogging’s method of getting editors to select their favourite posts each week. I’m sure you’d get plenty of volunteers lining up to be actively involved.
This is a repost of my comment over at Bora’s site, but, I thought it would be good to add it on this entry. The worry of many of us is that this will codify the exclusion of the independent science bloggers. What I find striking is how similar many of the conceptual and technical issues are to a site I ran a long time ago. I think I came up with a decent solution, and I’m more than welcome to chat in more detail about it. So, here was my comment:
A quick thought on the how-to-incorporate-indy-bloggers/show-the-entirity-of-the-sciblogosphere. Years ago I ran a site called foodpornwatch (now defunct, but, hey, I got an interview out of it). It started in the pre-rss days, so, there was no feed that could easily be checked. Also, my server had little bandwidth for the page to be regenerated fresh for every user. The solution was simple. Every hour, on the hour, the site would scroll through all of the blogs listed (people could add a blog, and I would look at it to make sure it really was, indeed, a food blog). It would use the content and generate a checksum value, and if the checksum differed, it would mark it as updated. Then, once all sites were checked, it would generate a static html page that had everyone listed in order of last update.
This approach was great for the internet of 2001. And it was adaptable. As dynamically generated content came into vogue, I began checking rss feeds instead of the site itself. As the number of food blogs exploded, I implemented asynchronous checking so that the bandwidth usage of my server stayed to a low background minimum. The page was still generated from the database every hour on the hour. And it was a nice, static, low-bandwidth html page.
Perhaps this is a solution that would work either a) for pulling all blogs together or, b) to generate an indy-blog feed? I’ve got ooooooold code (and not very good – originally, I created it just to teach myself perl) lying around if you’d ever like to take a peak.
Did you start the blog just for the pageviews? Who would be forcing you to do anything?
I will say this: more than half the science blogs I read daily are not affiliated with any network. The networks seem to be overwhelmingly run by and populated with the biological/behavioral/health sciences, with physics and other topics making mostly token appearances. I’m in computer science, and when I want to read about CS or math or statistics (and not information technology or engineering), these networks have very little for me.
I follow and like a lot of the biomed blogs, but there’s still a wide world of unnetworked blogs that are getting most of my traffic.
The recent CS blog kerfuffle about a claimed proof of P vs NP, written up for the NY Times, took place almost entirely on unnetworked blogs, the main ones being Dick Lipton’s, Scott Aaronson’s, and Lance Fortnow & Bill Gasarch’s. I venture a guess that most of the people that were involved in commenting on that are at best vaguely aware that science blogging networks exist.
We’re thinking about adding independent bloggers. If you’re an independent blogger now and want to join us, the best way is to join a network. Or create your own. It doesn’t have to be a formal arrangement — you can have a network and keep your blog on your existing site — all you need to do is use a service like FriendFeed or Yahoo! Pipes to collect your RSS feeds into a single feed.
Blake, in the long run, I agree that some sort of ResearchBlogging-esque registration system would be ideal. If we have time (or volunteers), we might think about creating such a thing. But for now we wanted to get something up quickly, and we’d like to refine this model as much as we can until we can figure out how to produce something better.
[...] This post from Dave puts forth some ideas for adding “science blogs”. The first problem is defining what’s a science blog. I faced this in both of my previous studies, and I solved it two different ways. One I was very strict: self-identified scientists posting mostly on scientific topics. The other I was more broad – the above plus scientists posting on life in science, plus everyone else blogging about science. [...]