ScienceBlogs

Last updated
ScienceBlogs
Science Blogs logo.JPG
Type of site
 Blogs
Headquarters New York
Owner Seed Media Group
URL scienceblogs.com
LaunchedJanuary, 2006

ScienceBlogs is an invitation-only blog network and virtual community that operated initially for almost 12 years, from 2006 to 2017. It was created by Seed Media Group to enhance public understanding of science. [1] Each blog had its own theme, speciality and author(s) and was not subject to editorial control. Authors included active scientists working in industry, universities and medical schools as well as college professors, physicians, professional writers, graduate students, and post-docs. On 24 January 2015, 19 of the blogs had seen posting in the past month. 11 of these had been on ScienceBlogs since 2006. ScienceBlogs shut down at the end of October 2017. [2] [3] In late August 2018, the website's front page displayed a notice suggesting it was about to become active once again.

Contents

History

ScienceBlogs was launched in January 2006 with 15 blogs on the network. For the launch blogs, Seed invited some of the best-known independent science bloggers and allowed them to blog about whichever subjects they wished. [4] Revenue was generated through advertisements sold to companies who wished to attract "bright, curious consumers who buy products like automobiles, books, cellphones, computers, liquor, music and watches." [5]

As a result of the free rein given to bloggers and the incentive to increase traffic, bloggers on the network often discussed hot topics such as politics and religion in addition to science. These topics frequently incited heated arguments in the comment threads and bloggers on the network sometimes got into arguments with each other over a series of posts. [4]

ScienceBlogs and Seed received some notable awards at the end of their first year of activity, including the 2006 UTNE Independent Press Award for Best Science/Technology Coverage being granted to Seed, in large part due to the success of ScienceBlogs. Additionally, two blogs on the network received Weblog awards: Pharyngula for Best Science Blog and Respectful Insolence for Best Medical/Health Issues Blog.

The creators of ScienceBlogs expanded their collection of hosted blogs in three major waves, supplemented by individual additions along the way. Some of the most trafficked blogs included Pharyngula, Respectful Insolence, Good Math Bad Math, Deltoid, Cognitive Daily, Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted) and On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess.

According to Technorati, as of 7 July 2007, ScienceBlogs had an "authority" of 9,581 and its number of inbound links ranks it 37th among blogs worldwide. [6] As of 14 March 2008, Quantcast charts it as having over 1.1 million monthly unique visitors, 65% of whom are from the United States. [7]

As of February 2009, ScienceBlogs hosted 75 blogs dedicated to various fields of research. In April 2011, ScienceBlogs was taken over by National Geographic. While Seed would still maintain ownership of the site, National Geographic would acquire editorial control and responsibility for advertising sales on the site. [8]

ScienceBlogs launched a German language edition of the site, ScienceBlogs.de, in 2008 in partnership with Hubert Burda Media. As of 7 December 2010, the site hosted 35 blogs. [9] ScienceBlogs Brazil debuted in March 2009 with 23 Portuguese language blogs.

"PepsiGate"

In June 2010, ScienceBlogs started a blog which was sponsored by PepsiCo and was to be written by their employees. [10] [11] This led to backlash by many of the bloggers on ScienceBlogs who considered this to be an unethical mix of advertising and journalism, [12] [13] and the PepsiCo blog was withdrawn from ScienceBlogs. This affair was informally named "PepsiGate". By the middle of July approximately a quarter of the bloggers had left ScienceBlogs. Subsequently, some bloggers such as PZ Myers of Pharyngula announced they were going on strike as part of a general feeling that the people running Seed had failed to respond to concerns surrounding the incident. [14] Seed Media responded by killing off Food Frontiers, the Pepsico sponsored blog, but that didn't stop the defections. According to PZ Myers, "The ship is sinking". A writer at the New York Times Magazine reviewed the incident and commented, "ScienceBlogs has become Fox News for the religion-baiting, peak-oil crowd." [15] Some other science blogging networks were launched, including scientopia.org, scienceseeker.org and one hosted by The Guardian . In early 2015, however, eleven of the network's 2006 founding-generation blogs were still active, including Myers's.

Demise

On 14 October 2017, astrophysics blogger Steinn Sigurðsson publicly revealed that ScienceBlogs was due to be shut down, [16] and David Gorski, author of the "Respectful Insolence" blog under his pseudonym Orac, stated that ScienceBlogs had "barely existed as an entity for a few years". [17] Astrophysics blogger Ethan Siegel reported on 22 October 2017 that ScienceBlogs had informed bloggers it "no longer had the funds to keep the site operational, and so they would be shutting down". [18]

Revival

In late August 2018, a note appeared on the home page which said that ScienceBlogs was now part of the Science 2.0 family and that plans were in place to make the site active once again. [19]

Awards

Content

ScienceBlogs consisted of ten channels, or categories, of blog entries. Each blog author decided what channel his or her individual post belongs in, and each post was indexed accordingly on the main page. The categories were:

See also

Related Research Articles

A blog is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page. Until 2009, blogs were usually the work of a single individual, occasionally of a small group, and often covered a single subject or topic. In the 2010s, "multi-author blogs" (MABs) emerged, featuring the writing of multiple authors and sometimes professionally edited. MABs from newspapers, other media outlets, universities, think tanks, advocacy groups, and similar institutions account for an increasing quantity of blog traffic. The rise of Twitter and other "microblogging" systems helps integrate MABs and single-author blogs into the news media. Blog can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

The blogosphere is made up of all blogs and their interconnections. The term implies that blogs exist together as a connected community or as a social networking service in which everyday authors can publish their opinions.

Technorati was a search engine and a publisher advertising platform that served as an advertising solution for the thousands of websites in its network. Technorati launched its ad network in 2008, and at one time was one of the largest ad networks reaching more than 100 million unique visitors per month. The name Technorati was a portmanteau of the words technology and literati, which evokes the notion of technological intelligence or intellectualism.

<i>RealClimate</i> Blog on climatology

RealClimate is a commentary site (blog) on climatology. The site's contributors include climate scientists whose goal is to provide a response to developing stories and a context they feel is sometimes missing in mainstream commentary on climate science and climate change. The forum is moderated, and is restricted to scientific topics to avoid discussion of political or economic implications of the science. RealClimate was launched on 10 December 2004 by nine climate scientists.

Cheri Pierson Yecke is an author and retired conservative Republican professor in the United States.

Weblogs, Inc. was a blog network that published content on a variety of subjects, including tech news, video games, automobiles and pop culture. At one point, the network had as many as 90 blogs, although the vast majority of its traffic could be attributed to a smaller number of breakout titles, as was typical of most large-scale successful blog networks of the mid-2000s. Popular blogs included: Engadget, Autoblog, TUAW, Joystiq, Luxist, Slashfood, Cinematical, TV Squad, Download Squad, Blogging Baby, Gadling, AdJab, and Blogging Stocks.

Pharyngula, a blog founded and written by PZ Myers, is hosted on ScienceBlogs and on FreeThoughtBlogs (2011–present). In 2006 the science journal Nature listed it as the top-ranked blog written by a scientist based on popularity. The blog addresses a range of topics, including Myers's academic specialty, biology. It has become particularly well known for Myers's writing style and for his criticism of intelligent design and creationism. In 2009, Hemant Mehta ranked Pharyngula the most popular atheist blog, based on subscriber levels and other factors.

Science Daily is an American website launched in 1995 that aggregates press releases and publishes lightly edited press releases about science, similar to Phys.org and EurekAlert!.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Discovery Institute intelligent design campaigns</span> Campaigns which seek to promote intelligent design creationism

The Discovery Institute has conducted a series of related public relations campaigns which seek to promote intelligent design while attempting to discredit evolutionary biology, which the Institute terms "Darwinism." The Discovery Institute promotes the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement and is represented by Creative Response Concepts, a public relations firm.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bloggingheads.tv</span> Video blog web site

Bloggingheads.tv is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers. The site was started by the journalist and author Robert Wright and the blogger and journalist Mickey Kaus on November 1, 2005. Kaus has since dropped out of operational duties of the site as he didn't want his frequent linking to be seen as a conflict of interest. Most of the earlier discussions posted to the site involved one or both of those individuals, but since has grown to include a total of over one thousand individual contributors, mostly journalists, academics, scientists, authors, well known political bloggers, and other notable individuals.

Zooillogix is a zoology blog on the ScienceBlogs network, created and edited by Andrew and Benny Bleiman. The site has been featured on ABC News, in Seed magazine, Mental Floss, FHM, and the Annals of Improbable Research, awarders of the Ig Nobel Prize. The site attracts a diverse readership from notable scientists, such as PZ Myers, to biology students to young children.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">PZ Myers</span> American biologist (born 1957)

Paul Zachary Myers is an American biologist who founded and writes the Pharyngula science-blog. He is associate professor of biology at the University of Minnesota Morris (UMM) where he works in the field of developmental biology. He is a critic of intelligent design and the creationist movement and other pseudoscientific concepts.

<i>FDDs Long War Journal</i>

FDD's Long War Journal (LWJ) is an American news website, also described as a blog, which reports on the War on terror. The site is operated by Public Multimedia Incorporated (PMI), a non-profit media organization established in 2007. PMI is run by Paul Hanusz and Bill Roggio. Roggio is the managing editor of the journal and Thomas Joscelyn is senior editor. The site is a project of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where both Roggio and Joscelyn are senior fellows.

<i>SmartPlanet</i> Online magazine

SmartPlanet was an online magazine that covered clean technology and information technology as it related to healthcare, science, transportation, corporate sustainability, architecture, and design. It was part of the business portfolio of CBS Interactive that included BNET and ZDNet and was known for its daily coverage of the technology and energy industries. It stopped publishing on June 30, 2014.

The courtier's reply is a type of informal fallacy, coined by American biologist PZ Myers, in which a respondent to criticism claims that the critic lacks sufficient knowledge, credentials, or training to pose any sort of criticism whatsoever. It may be considered an inverted form of argument from authority, where a person without authority disagreeing with authority is presumed incorrect prima facie.

Science Online was an annual conference held in Durham, North Carolina, Raleigh, North Carolina and Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, that focused on the role of the internet in science and science communication. It was attended primarily by bloggers and science journalists from North America.

<i>Journal of Cosmology</i> Academic journal

The Journal of Cosmology describes itself as a peer-reviewed open access scientific journal of cosmology, although the quality of the process has been questioned. The journal has been closely related historically with a similar online website, Cosmology and Journal of Astrobiology and Space Science Reviews., as all three were founded by neuroscientist Rhawn Gabriel Joseph. Rhawn Joseph established the journal in 2009, published by Cosmology Science Publishers, and it was sold to Modern Cosmology Associates in 2011. Rudolph Schild is the editor-in-chief.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ontogenetic depth</span> Pseudoscientific concept

Ontogenetic depth is a pseudoscientific idea proposed in February 2003 by Paul Nelson, an American philosopher of science, young Earth creationist and intelligent design advocate; he is employed by the Discovery Institute.

Stuart Pivar is an American art collector from Brooklyn, New York known for being one of the founders of the New York Academy of Art along with Andy Warhol. Trained as a scientist, he has long endorsed the study of anatomy and need for artists to acquire technical skills. Pivar grew his fortune in the plastics industry and is also the author of several books.

Natural News is a far-right, anti-vaccination conspiracy theory and fake news website known for promoting alternative medicine, pseudoscience, disinformation, and far-right extremism. The website began publishing articles in 2008 and is based in the United States.

References

  1. ↑ "About ScienceBlogs". Archived from the original on July 10, 2007. Retrieved 2007-07-27.
  2. ↑ "Aard Is Moving – Aardvarchaeology". scienceblogs.com. Retrieved 2017-10-18.
  3. ↑ "Need advice from WordPress experts". Pharyngula. 2017-10-18. Retrieved 2017-10-18.
  4. 1 2 Bryant, Stephen (April 13, 2006). "Pass the politics, please: Science blogs peppered with commentary". Online Journalism Review . Archived from the original on November 3, 2009.
  5. ↑ Elliott, Stuart (January 20, 2006). "Science Blogs as a Vehicle for Upscale Ads". The New York Times .
  6. ↑ "ScienceBlogs Technorati Ranking". Technorati, Inc. Retrieved 2007-07-07.
  7. ↑ "ScienceBlogs Quantcast Ranking" . Retrieved 2008-03-14.
  8. ↑ "National Geographic Taking the Wheel at Scienceblogs.com". Columbia Journalism Review. Retrieved 16 July 2012.
  9. ↑ "Über ScienceBlogs | ScienceBlogs.de - Wissenschaft, Kultur, Politik" . Retrieved 2010-12-07.
  10. ↑ Appell, David (2010-07-20). "PepsiCo and the shame of the bloggerati". The Guardian. London.
  11. ↑ Dobbs, David (2010-07-21). "How we tried (not) to silence Pepsi". The Guardian. London.
  12. ↑ Jha, Alok (2010-07-07). "ScienceBlogs, we have a problem". The Guardian. London.
  13. ↑ Vince, Gaia (2010-07-09). "This isn't the first time Seed has sacrificed editorial independence". The Guardian. London.
  14. ↑ PZ Myers on July 20, 2010 (2010-07-20). "Pharyngula on STRIKE – Pharyngula". Scienceblogs.com. Archived from the original on January 19, 2012. Retrieved 2014-05-14.
  15. ↑ Heffernan, Virginia (July 30, 2010). "Unnatural Science". New York Times. Retrieved 31 July 2010.
  16. ↑ "QRT | ScienceBlogs".
  17. ↑ "A change is gonna come. Respectful Insolence is moving. | ScienceBlogs".
  18. ↑ "Ethan – Starts With A Bang". scienceblogs.com. Archived from the original on 2012-06-21.
  19. ↑ "ScienceBlogs". ScienceBlogs. Science 2.0. Archived from the original on 27 August 2018. Retrieved 27 August 2018.
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