(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.
