An outline for version 2.0 of the site

A few weeks ago I wrote up a tentative outline for the next generation of Science Blogging Aggregated. I’ve been sharing bits and pieces of it with you over the past week, but now I’d like to share the whole thing. It’s still a work in progress, a Google Doc that reflects our current thinking on the project—but of course, something that will continue to be refined as we move forward with the project.

Click here to view the document.

I’ve already tried to incorporate as many as possible comments from readers as I’ve shared the plans with you, but of course we continue to be open to additional suggestions. I think this is enough for us to use to get started, but there’s obviously much work still to be done. If you’d like to help out, you can either email us directly at contact@scienceblogging.org, or add a comment below and we’ll get in touch with you via the (hidden) email link you provide in the comment form. Particularly useful at this stage are people with CSS / web design experience, developers, and sysadmins.

We’re hoping to present a working prototype of the site at Science Online 2011. I’ve suggested a session on the conference wiki here.

We’ll continue to keep you posted and ask for your advice and suggestions as work progresses.

Building a better network: Identifying trends/posts of interest

When you build a network of blogging networks, the problem quickly escalates from “how do I collect as much data as possible?” to “how do I manage all this data?”

Take a look at the Science Blogging Aggregated home page. There’s lots of great stuff there — too much for the typical reader to handle. Even if you visit several times a day, the information rushes by too quickly to discern any trends, and it’s hard to know which posts are really well thought out and which are just one-off posts that hardly merit your attention at all.

We talked yesterday about one way of sorting through the data — tags. However, this method alone probably won’t satisfy all users. A person might be interested in all posts tagged “psychology,” but they might just want to see the highlights of what’s going on in other fields, and tagging won’t help them identify the most interesting, thoughtful posts.

We see at least four possible ways of sifting through the posts to find the most interesting ones.

1. Crowd-sourced ranking. Users rate or recommend posts they like, so others can sort by rating or number of recommendations to find the posts they want to see. An advantage is that there is no central authority telling readers what to like. A disadvantage is that blogs that are already very popular are perhaps most likely to be recommended, so this system might not help users identify up-and-coming blogs that are very high quality.

2. Self-promotion. Bloggers could promote a small number of their posts, indicating these are their best work (one per week? one per month?). This overcomes the “up-and-comer” problem, but a blogger whose work is mediocre could exploit the system by promoting posts that aren’t very interesting or useful to others.

3. Active curation. Editors could be chosen for each field (physics, biology, etc.) and actively promote one or two posts each day. That way readers would know that an expert has read all the posts on a topic and selected the most interesting or relevant. Advantages are that editors may be able to identify trends that more automated systems don’t catch, and that editors may be less swayed by the most popular blogs. Disadvantages include possible bias of editors, and variable editor quality. It would also require coming up with a system for selecting editors. Would a central person be in charge of that, or would we need to create some sort of a system for nominating/voting for editors?

4. Social networking. We could create a truly social network where users are only shown the “likes” of their friends. However, this requires a significant programming effort, and people are reluctant to join new social networks when they already participate actively in one or more networks. I think we might be better off using the social features of other networks, rather than building our own. If we could make it really easy for people to post their “likes” to Twitter and Facebook, then we could leverage those networks to perform the social function.

There is, of course, no reason that we shouldn’t do all of these things over the long run. But we have limited resources. Which of these approaches is most useful? Are there any other approaches that would work better? Do you have any specific suggestions for how to implement any of these ideas? Let us know in the comments.