By Andy Extance, ScienceSeeker Editor-in-Chief
In recent months, ScienceSeeker
has exorcised many of the dead blogs haunting its list of science sites. Consequently,
the number of sites we aggregate has decreased from 2170 when I became editor-in-chief
in January 2016 to 2065 now, in May 2017. But rather than finding that decline worrying,
I think this exercise has shown how science sites are adapting to a changing blogging
environment.
When my predecessor Jordan Gaines
Lewis handed the reins over to me, she and fellow editor Jessica Perry Hekman had
just completely rebuilt ScienceSeeker. The site had been born in the whirlwind,
heat and flash of the ScienceOnline movement, supported, I understand, in part
by the revenues from its conferences. That had enabled a professional-looking,
highly functional site that cost $40 a month to run.
The ScienceOnline money inevitably
ran out, and to start with our editors took turns in paying. Jordan and Jessica then switched to our now
almost-free format, hosted on Blogger and powered by the RSS feed reader
Inoreader. Not only is this more frugal, Inoreader kindly informs us which feeds
are no longer active. Therefore over the last 17 months I have been going through
that list, seeking the new homes of blogs that have moved and removing those
that have expired. And the experience has provided some interesting insights
into trends in the science blogosphere at various levels. The headlines are as follows:
