Crowdsourcing request: Help us create a list of blogs for v. 2.0

Update: Thanks to everyone for your help! We’ve finished updating the database. Look here for news on our launch on Saturday, January 15.

In just under three weeks, we’ll be unveiling the beta version of the next generation of this site.

The new site will work very differently from this one; it is a custom-created database that collects information from hundreds—and ultimately thousands of blogs. Users will easily be able to select just the topics they want, instead of seeing posts based on what network they are on. We want the beta site to be usable from day one, but to do that, we need some help.

I’ve created a Google Docs Spreadsheet for this purpose. Anyone can access the spreadsheet and make modifications. What we need are the name, URL, RSS address, and topic of each blog. What we have, in most cases, is just the URL. If everyone pitches in and visits 10 to 20 blogs, then we should be able to generate this information in a matter of days, if not hours.

Most of the blogs are listed on the Master Blog List (the first tab at the bottom of the spreadsheet). To start helping, just fill in the information in the space provided. If you figure out an automated way of doing this, you can reserve a block of blogs by typing your name in the designated column; then no one will duplicate your efforts.

The reason we need humans to do this is that we want the blogs to be classified by topic. We’ve generated a list of topics (on the last tab in the spreadsheet). When you visit a blog, figure out what topic from our list best describes the blog, and enter it in the space provided (most web browsers will display a drop-down menu to make this easy for you).

The other tabs are for blog networks that are a little more difficult to suss out; either there was no easy way for us to find a list of blogs, or there are non-science blogs mixed in with science blogs. So, we’ve given specific directions for what to do in each case.

FAQs

• My Blog Isn’t Listed!
  Don’t worry! Either we’ve already got all the info we need (in the case of some blog networks) or you’re an independent blogger and you’ll be able to register your blog when the site launches. If you don’t think you’re in either of those camps, let us know in the comments below
• None of the official topics apply to this blog
  Just pick the closest match. You can get more specific in the secondary topic
• I don’t agree with your list of topics
  We had to start somewhere. The list will be easily modifiable in the future.
• One of the listed blogs is not scientific
  Explain your objection in the Notes section on the spreadsheet
• Someone has reserved a block of blogs for hours
  You can use File –> See revision history to see how recently an update was made. If it’s been more than an hour, feel free to delete their name, substitute yours, and work on that entry
• There’s no drop-down menu of topics
  Try using a different browser. I’ve tested it on Safari and Firefox, but I can confirm it doesn’t work on Chrome for Mac.
• What’s in it for me?
  Our eternal gratitude? Plus, if we see you at a conference, we’ll buy you a beer

Thanks again. Let us know if you have any other questions in the comments.

Here’s another link to the Google Docs Spreadsheet

Building a better aggregator: Goals, Tagging

The ScienceBlogging site you see now was always intended to be a temporary solution. What we really need is a site that not only aggregates blog posts, but also allows users to classify them, search them, highlight their favorites, point their friends to them, and do many other things we haven’t even imagined yet.

Behind the scenes, Bora, Anton, Jessica, Mark, and I have been discussing how to do that, but we realized that limiting the discussion to just ourselves is depriving us of a valuable resource: The people who’ll be using and contributing to the new site.

So, over the next few days, I’ll be offering some thoughts about how to proceed and inviting your comments. Our plan is to have at least a partially functional, working prototype of the new site by the ScienceOnline conference in January 2011. Let’s get that started right now by discussing the goals for the site.

Goals
Here are the goals we came up with for the site:

• To be a central site where scientists, media, other experts, and laypeople see what scientific topics are being discussed on blogs, in real time
• To be a resource for locating past discussions
• To promote science blogging and other online discussion of science
• To promote scientific accuracy and avoid pseudoscience and crackpottery
• To be encyclopedic and inclusive
• To be searchable and filterable
• To have a system (or multiple systems) for highlighting discussions and posts that are especially topical / high quality
• To have a means of removing or hiding posts that are not scientific (e.g. vacation photos, political rants unrelated to science, etc.)
• To be multilingual
• To be open source / open access

Should anything be added, changed, or removed?

Tags
One of the first considerations will be how to keep track of all this information, and a huge key to that will be classifying it. That’s why we think it will be essential to have a unified tagging system in place. If bloggers don’t select their primary tags from a central list, then it will be difficult for users to find posts on the topics that interest them. On the other hand, if bloggers must visit our site to choose primary categories, then usage will suffer. We can allow bloggers to set default tags for their posts using their registration page, but there should be some way to override those settings for individual posts, still using our list of preferred tags.

Could we create a WordPress plugin for this? Or adapt an existing plugin? What about other blogging platforms? What about templates that don’t support tags? One possibility is using a bookmarklet, which would be platform neutral but not ideal. Any other ideas on how to implement a tagging system?

That’s just the first bit — there’s a lot more to discuss, but we thought this would be a good way to get the conversation started. So please, let us know what you think in the comments.

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]

Some thoughts about science blog aggregation

(Adapted from two posts on Word Munger)

After the summer’s “PepsiGate” affair and the subsequent departure of 20 or so bloggers from ScienceBlogs, I suggested that if the departing bloggers want to continue to have the kind of influence they used to have at ScienceBlogs, they need to do something more than just start or restart their old, independent blogs. They need to form a new network — perhaps built around different principles, but a network nonetheless. They might choose to have a central site based on RSS feeds or some other aggregation system, but there needs to be a systematic way to connect their conversations. Otherwise, most readers will tune out. It’s simply too much work for most readers to follow a diverse set of disconnected blogs. Social networking sites like Twitter can bring important individual posts to light, but are less effective at sharing the extended conversations that go on between blogs.

Sure, there are some other burgeoning science blog networks, but none seem to be prepared to assume the ScienceBlogs mantle (which ScienceBlogs itself hasn’t actually yet ceded). There are also some lists of all the bloggers who’ve left ScienceBlogs, but they don’t capture all the other science bloggers who were never a part of ScienceBlogs, or the many excellent bloggers who chose to stay.

To me, the obvious next step would be to find some way of collecting all these disparate voices in one place. Sure, ResearchBlogging does some of that, but it only captures posts specifically about peer-reviewed research, which is probably less than ten percent of what scientists and science communicators actually blog about.

One idea that shows promise, at least as a stopgap, is to use an existing social network to do the task. There’s already discussion over at Friendfeed about doing just that. The advantages of such a system is that Friendfeed already has tools in place to help people “like” and “dislike” posts, discuss them, and so on.

To see how this might work, I created a FriendFeed group for Anthropology, based on blogs registered with ResearchBlogging.org. You can check it out here. But this isn’t all Anthropology blogs, or even all Anthro blogs registered with ResearchBlogging — I cheated a bit because my default report of regisered blogs doesn’t include RSS addresses. I only used blogs from Blogger and Wordpress since their RSS URLs are easily reproduced based on the blog URL. And there are other problems. Many blogs cover multiple topics. How would you decide how which list(s) to put them on? What if someone started posting pseudoscience, or moved their blog? Who would be in charge of monitoring the list to make sure it remains useful? And how many people would actually register with FriendFeed just to follow blogs? The beauty of a site like ScienceBlogs is it stands on its own — you go there to read blogs about science. Someone who’s only interested in science (and not social networking) is less likely to hang around a site like FriendFeed just to read science blogs. I’m unconvinced that a set of feeds could have the same influence as a dedicated science blog aggregator.

In the wake of these thoughts, Bora, Anton and I came up with something we think is at least a little better. This site is sort of an aggregator of aggregators. We’re letting others do the work of collecting blogs into bundles; we’re just sharing all those bundles. If other bundles are promising, we’ll add them to the aggregator here, with a minimum of fuss. It’s not ideal — I think the ideal aggregator would have more active curators, and a way to sort through all the posts by topic — but it’s certainly a good start. Let us know what you think.