ScienceOnline 2013 news

The ScienceSeeker team loved meeting so many of you at ScienceOnline 2013! Quite a few of you came up to our booth, attended our blitz session, or had lunch with us. We got some great feedback for what is important to you in future features, and we really appreciated everyone's kind words about how useful ScienceSeeker is to you.

For those of you who weren't there, our big news is our first contest. The grand prize winner will receive $1000 and a guaranteed spot at Scio14. The guaranteed spot garnered more enthusiasm from attendees than the cash:



The most-requested features were:

• People want to be able to load older blog posts in to the site. Right now, the site only reads posts that are still in your feed. We will look into finding ways to load up older ones!


• People would like to be able to group together similar blogs, forming pseudo-networks on ScienceSeeker. This would be a way to have a single feed for multiple blogs. This is something we've already been thinking about, but we'll move it up the priority list.


• People want to be able to more easily search by post-level tags: "I want to see all the posts which are tagged 'genetics.'" This is doable now, but there isn't an easy user interface for it. We'll work on that soon, too.

Let us know if we missed any requests.

It was great meeting so many of you face to face. See you next year!

Announcing The Inaugural Science Seeker Awards

We are pleased to announce the inaugural Science Seeker Awards!

We hope that these awards will be a way to feature several of the most outstanding blog posts, podcasts, or videos from the past year, as well as serve as a way for those who are perhaps unfamiliar with our website to play and explore.

There will be a total of eleven awards handed out. The best single post from among the following ten categories will each receive an award of $100:

• Best biology post


• Best physics, astronomy, or earth science post


• Best psychology or neuroscience post


• Best medical sciences post


• Best chemistry post


• Best podcast or video


• Best post about peer-reviewed research


• Best post by a high school or undergraduate blogger


• Best science art post (e.g. cartoon, photo, drawing, sketch, painting, etc)


• Best life-in-science post

Click here to see the posts that have been nominated

In addition, there will be a grand prize for Post of the Year which will receive an award of $1000. No single post can win more than one award, including the grand prize.

We're also pleased to announce that the judges for the inaugural Science Seeker Awards are Fraser Cain, Maggie Koerth-Baker, and Maryn McKenna. We'll be introducing you individually to each judge in the coming weeks here on the Science Seeker News Blog.

How does the nomination process work?

The nomination process will run from February 1, 2013 through midnight on April 1, 2013 (so, really, the evening of March 31 is the time for last minute nominations).

It's really simple to nominate a post: just find that post's entry on Science Seeker (hint: use the filters and search box on the right sidebar), and click the little trophy icon. Then, you'll be prompted to identify for which of the ten categories above you'd like to nominate the post. All nominated posts are also automatically considered for "Post of the Year."

Posts can be nominated for multiple categories. For example, you might notice that the post you'd like to nominate has already been nominated for "best post about peer-reviewed research," but could also be nominated for "best biology post." If you'd like to nominate the post for a new category, that's fine.

If a post has already been nominated, another way to lend your support to that post is to "recommend" it, by clicking on the little "star" icon.

At the end of the nomination period, the Science Seeker editors will use the total number of nominations (the trophy icon) as well as the total number of recommendations (the star icon) in order to crowdsource a list of finalists, which will be handed over to the judges.

The judges will collectively determine the winner for each of the ten categories, as well as the overall grand prize winner. The winners will be announced on May 1, 2013.

What posts (or podcasts, or videos) are eligible?

Any post, podcast episode, or video that was first published between February 1, 2012 and February 1, 2013 are eligible for the Science Seeker Awards.

To nominate a post, however, the blog has to be indexed by Science Seeker. If your blog, podcast, or video series is not yet indexed by Science Seeker, don't worry! The submission process is simple. Just click the button that says Add Site on the top menu. (Find detailed instructions here.)

Any questions?

Feel free to leave a comment here on this post, use the contact form, or tweet us @SciSeeker. For more detailed questions only, email Science Seeker Associate Editor Jason G. Goldman: jason at scienceseeker dot org

Update: Modified categories to add "earth science" to Physics/Astronomy category

Mathblogging.org launches using the ScienceSeeker Codebase

Our friends at Mathblogging.org have upgraded their site with a fantastic array of new features. We can say that with some knowledge because they are using SubjectSeeker, the same open-source codebase used to run ScienceSeeker!

We believe that the SubjectSeeker code can be used to collect news and discussion on almost any topic, and this is just the first example.

We have been working for several months with Mathblogging to help them move to the new platform, and we couldn't be more thrilled with the results. Here's an excerpt from their official announcement:

To celebrate ScienceOnline 2013, we’re very happy to announce the launch of the new and improved mathblogging.org!

Among our new features are:

• Our editors! A group of dedicated bloggers who regularly share their favorite pieces, right on the front page — it’s like our Weekly Picks, only better!


• A user system – register an account & claim your blog today, add comments to posts just like our editors do and have them tweeted right away.  And you can look forward to more features in the near future!


• An easy way to add sites: just paste the link and we’ll do the rest.


• A better search — easy to get to, easy to work with, easy to find stuff.


• A robust API — to build personalized searches, feeds and whatever you can think of (with more in the making).


• Moar social media!!11!eleventy!! — three new twitter accounts will give you the Editor Picks, the Notes and the firehose feed, with more to come in the future. Google+ and other platforms soon to follow.

Congratulations to Mathblogging.org! We look forward to working with them -- and many other sites -- in the future!

ScienceSeeker updated with new features

The ScienceSeeker site was updated today with some great new features. Users can now set up their own profiles with photos and descriptions. Users can tag any post with the topic of their choice, and users can create and follow groups based on their interests. In the future we plan on expanding these features to help users find other users and groups with similar interests to their own...and we'll have a big announcement on Friday which will depend heavily on this new functionality!

Details on the new features (from our help page):

Using Tags

ScienceSeeker organizes information in two different ways. Topics are the general subject areas that each source site uses. Each site can have two topics. For example, the Bipolar Beat blog is categorized under "Psychology."

Tags are used to categorize individual posts. For example, Bipolar Beat usually makes posts that are more specific than just the general topic of "Psychology", and ScienceSeeker captures all the tags that the blogger used to categorize the post. Click on the "..." icon next to any post on our site to see the post profile page, and you will see a list of all the tags the author added to the post. For this post, the authors also tagged it with "Career," "disability", "bipolar disorder", "social security disability" and "ticket to work." Click on any of those tags to see a list of all posts from every source on ScienceSeeker using that tag.

Note: Any tag that starts with a Capital Letter is actually a Topic, and will bring up all posts from sources using that topic in addition to individual posts using the tag.

You can also add your own tags to a post.

• Log in to ScienceSeeker


• Click on the icon for the post you want to tag


• Click the "+ Add Tag" button.


• Add the tag you would like in the dialog that appears.


• Choose "Public" if you want everyone to see the tag, and "Private" if the tag is just for your personal use.

Using Groups

Groups are a powerful tool for following and sharing posts about topics that interest you most. You can create, follow, and edit groups, and soon we will add even more ways to interact through groups.

• To see the most recently-formed groups, click on the Groups tab at the top of the ScienceSeeker home page


• Clicking on a group name will show you the most recent items from that group, let you know who manages the group, and shows you the tags that apply to the group. For example, the group "Some big bang posts" tracks posts with the tag "big bang."


• If you are logged in to your ScienceSeeker account, you can recommend, comment on, or follow the group by clicking on the appropriate link at the top of the group page.


• To create your own group, Login and hover over your user name to bring up a menu. Click on the "My Groups" link.


• Type the name of your group and a description.


• Click on "Create Group".


• Add the tags you would like this group to track. You can use tags you create, or official ScienceSeeker topics. When you type in a topic name it will appear capitalized, and will bring up both individual posts with that tag and all posts for sources categorized with that topic.


• Optionally you can upload an image to serve as the header for the group. Important: The image must be at least 1000 x 125 pixels. You can crop larger images to correct size, but smaller images will not work.


• To modify or delete a group, click on the "+" sign next to the group name in your list under "my groups".

Jason Goldman named Associate Editor

I'm pleased to announce the addition of Jason Goldman to ScienceSeeker's management team as Associate Editor. In the coming months, Jason will work with ScienceSeeker on a number of projects, from coordinating our content editors to a super-secret, super-exciting project that will be announced at ScienceOnline 2013 at the end of the month.

Jason is is a doctoral candidate in developmental psychology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. For several years now, he has been a dynamo in the world of science online. His blog The Thoughtful Animal never fails to engage readers and has received numerous honors. His writing has appeared in Scientific American, BBC Future, The Guardian, The Best Science Writing Online 2012, and elsewhere. He edited the 2010 edition of The Open Laboratory.

Jason has also been a content editor here at ScienceSeeker and at ResearchBlogging.org, sifting through hundreds of posts on psychology and neuroscience to highlight the most interesting and innovative research and discussion.

Jason's own research focuses on the evolution and architecture of the mind, and how early experiences affect innate knowledge systems.

Please join me in welcoming Jason to the ScienceSeeker team!