Posts tagged Blogging
AoB Blog goes live (or what I’m doing on my summer holidays)
Jul 21st
AoB Blog is now live at aobblog.com. The design looks similar to this site, and that’s partly because I’ve been using this site to test some code. It’ll be part of the web presence I’m building for the Annals of Botany. Surprisingly there is some archaeological relevance. Papers are open to non-subscribers after a year and some of those are archaeobotanical.
I’ve emailed a couple of people about an interesting story on reburial. I’m trying to get a bit beyond the press release, but I’m not sure if that will happen soon as they’re both likely to be very busy.
In the meantime I’ve blogged Moving beyond the ‘One-dinosaur-fits-all’ model of science communication at AoB Blog. It probably has some relevance to archaeological / historical outreach too.
…and now the blog re-design in English
Jul 20th
Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos Blogging, after Franciso de Goya y Lucientes by Mike Licht
It’s simple. I looked at my blog and decided I didn’t like it.
The idea was good. I’m spending more time on various social network sites, so aggregating that activity onto one site sounds clever. However, the blog was not the way to do it. Links are often fairly baldly posted to FriendFeed or Twitter and only make brief appearance on this site. So the aggregation wasn’t happening. In addition the changes I’d made to make it a poor aggregator also made it a poor blog. It was an experiment worth trying, but it hasn’t worked.
So this update is partly necessity and it’s also partly to test out some other ideas. I’ve been hired by the Annals of Botany to do stuff for them. That’ll be launched during the summer but a blog will be part of it. Changing theme means I can test out some of the ideas on this blog with a live audience. For example I’ve added a Links category. Link posts will look different on the blog, and will show up in the feed with a twist. If all I’m doing is saying “Hey look More >
Retcon
Jul 20th
Little could be seen in the gloom. His flaming torch threw shadows of forgotten cabinets and abandoned servers around the room. At one desk sat a terminal shrouded in the cobwebs of long-dead spiders. Beneath the desk sat a terminal of eldritch, or at least oblong, dimensions. A twinge of doubt passed through his heart. Could this be restarted? Archimedes had once said that given a lever and firm place to stand he could move the world. He would have been a handy person to have around. The on button looked so fixed in place that he seriously considered leaving it where it was and moving the rest of the server fractionally forward to turn the machine on.. Eventually with enough application of oil the button shifted, complaining with a grinding sound that vibrated down into his bones.
The screen flickered into life. Early notes of a thesis crackled onto the screen, followed a by a brief note on Tribble was that really five years ago? At the time blogging was seen as a fad. Images flashed across the screen. Some connections flashed and flailed wildly. Where other servers were active they grew, Others reached out to lost sites like Copernicus Sashimi before withering.
Posts More >
Blogging Archaeology at the SAA
May 15th
Colleen Morgan has put forward a proposal for a Blogging Archaeology session at the SAA conference. My concern was that an explict blogging session would be case of preaching to the choir. Technophobes would have the convenience of skipping all the awkward talks in one package. However I think she’s proven me wrong. I think she’s got some useful ideas that could benefit from a conference session, in particular thoughts on privacy. I think this is a potential headache, especially if courses are going to encourage students to blog. It could be useful to help distinguish between anonymity and pseudonymity, and a conference might be the place to tackle this kind of question head on.
Sadly I don’t anticipate attending the SAA conference, but if there’s one session that will break out beyond the conference, then you’d expect it to be the one about blogging. You should keep an eye on Colleen’s blog Middle Savagery for more developments, but really Colleen is full enough of interesting ideas that you should be reading her blog anyway.
Congratulations to Afarensis!
Oct 4th
Afarensis is celebrating five years of blogging. What makes it worth celebrating is that he’s still going strong with things like this defence of our much maligned cousins, rather than limping over the anniversary.
I also should have linked to his edition of 4SH earlier. My plan was to blog about whether or not carnivals should go the way of blog memes (remember them?) in response to a post by Sharon Howard, but the recent 4SH and the ongoing Carnival of Space show there could be life in the format yet.
If you’re interested I was going to argue that something closer to instant aggregation along the lines of Pligg or Reddit might be better than a carnival with a two or four week turnaround. But I was underwhelmed with my experiments with Pligg, so I don’t have an answer yet.
The 2009 site revision
Aug 4th
I’ve started to consolidate various web presences into one Me Portal as Kimberly Alderman called it. It means moving from WordPress.com because in the end a hosted solution isn’t flexible enough. I’d still highly recommend WordPress.com, especially as a site for new bloggers. Still the little things, like spending an afternoon writing a script to import links, start to annoy. Now Postalicious will read what I’ve marked with a ‘share’ on Google Reader and you can read the latest shares on the home page.
Changes and UpgradesThe entries now fall into six categories: The Past, Science, Politics, Digital Academia and Life. The sixth category, for those who can count, is Featured. That’s the easy way of sticking stories into rotation on the front page.
The reason for doing that is that it should work better for various aggregators. Maia Atlantides doesn’t need to know about a photo of a cute kitten that I’ve seen, so I can provide a Past feed which only sends the relevant stuff. Likewise I’ve been thinking for a which of adding this site to an Atheism aggregator, but a lot of what I write wouldn’t really be relevant for that either. Now I have a Politics feed. I could have called it More >
Science is Cultures
Jul 17th
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said “Stop! don’t do it!” “Why shouldn’t I?” he said. I said, “Well, there’s so much to live for!” He said, “Like what?” I said, “Well…are you religious or atheist?” He said, “Religious.” I said, “Me too! Are you Christian or Buddhist?” He said, “Christian.” I said, “Me too! Are you Catholic or Protestant?” He said, “Protestant.” I said, “Me too! Are you Episcopalian or Baptist?” He said, “Baptist!” I said,”Wow! Me too! Are you Baptist Church of God or Baptist Church of the Lord?” He said, “Baptist Church of God!” I said, “Me too! Are you Original Baptist Church of God , or are you Reformed Baptist Church of God?” He said,”Reformed Baptist Church of God!” I said, “Me too! Are you Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1879, or Reformed Baptist Church of God, reformation of 1915?” He said, “Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!” I said, “DIE, HERETIC SCUM!” and pushed him off.
Emo Phillips demonstrates no-one is generically ‘religious’
I had 2000 words on Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s blogging More >
The Negative Influence of PZ Myers
Jul 16th
Does a supermassive blog illuminate or destroy?
Photo (cc) Dana Berry.
There’s a new flap going through a few Science blogs following the publication Unscientific America. One chapter of the book* argues that New Atheists in general and PZ Myers in particular are damaging science communication by being outspoken atheists. Religious people will flatly reject science if they’re told by people like Myers that science and religion are incompatible, say Mooney and Kirshenbaum. There’s plenty of problems with statement. Are religious people really that fragile? There’s also the problem that Mooney believes that science and religion are compatible, though he’s never made it clear exactly what he means by compatible. I think he’s demonstrably wrong, and I’ll show that in the future. For the sake of argument I’ll concede his point. If this is the case then Mooney and Kirshenbaum’s assertion that atheism needlessly turns people off science is plausible. It’s possible Myers is having a negative effect on science communication by picking an unnecessary fight. Even so, it’s not a certainty.
I can’t remember how or when I started blogging. The earliest entries in this blog have been re-dated to later dates. The original reason was that a blog was an More >
Linking like it’s 2005
Jul 12th
Via the Cliopatria blog I’ve been reading Laura McKenna’s thoughts on changes in blogging in The Blogosphere 2.0. On the whole I think blogging has changed for the better, but there was an observation on the lack of linking which I thought was fair.
In the past I used to compile posts which were lists of links of what I’d been reading. This meant opening and editing drafts each time I wanted to make a note, which was a pain. I moved to storing bookmarks on del.icio.us (now delicious.com). This collated links with minimal formatting and posted them on a daily basis if there were five or more links to post. It works, but it’s ugly. I moved to ma.gnolia which allowed more formatting. It also offered the promise of being able to theme collations, so that the past-based links came out in one post, the science links in another and so on. Sadly this option was never enabled, and things got worse when ma.gnolia suffered an existence faliure, along with its backups earlier this year. It’s made linking more of an effort again.
What I’ve been doing is posting to Friendfeed or Twitter, but that’s an imperfect solution for me. If I More >
Friendfeed: Tech Tuesday
Jun 2nd
So far we have Twitter, Flickr and possibly Audioboo. We could add more services like delicious or Zotero in the future, but we’re getting messy. How can you pull them all together? The answer is Friendfeed. I found Friendfeed easier to understand than Twitter, but I’m told I’m in a minority, so I’ll try and take it slowly.
If you sign in to Friendfeed you can then sign in to all your other online services. Friendfeed then pulls together a page of the latest things you’ve been posting around the web. So in my case if I comment on AJCann’s weblog, which uses Disqus for comments, those comments will appear in my Friendfeed stream. That’s because I’ve told Friendfeed where to find my Disqus account. It’s a bit like a collation of what you do on the social side of the internet. Like a lot of social things it gets more interesting when you add people.
If you have a Friendfeed account you can go to my page, subscribe, and you’ll see what I’m up to on your page. Do that with several friends and it starts to look like the social web in one convenient location. You won’t just see our tweets, you’ll see More >
