Comments on: A Bah-Bah-Bah Blog Blunder?

By: Robert Stribley

Robert Stribley — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 18:10:46 +0000

Thanks for those links, Chris. Yes, I suspect we all (including Saheli above) have been following PZ’s exploits for a while. According to his blog (which he’s now resumed), looks like he made some progress with Seed Media in resolving some next steps for moving forward more productively. Still, as this page reveals, there was a lot of blood lost in the meantime:

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/loom/2010/07/07/oh-pepsi-what-hath-thou-wrought/

I believe Discover, Wired UK and others are now hosting many of these bloggers – if they haven’t gone back to blogging solo.

By: Chris Boese

Chris Boese — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 01:07:08 +0000

I knew PZ Meyers and his terrific site before it was on ScienceBlogs, and it always seemed to me that ScienceBlogs and Seed Media needed him more than he needs them.

FWIW, I hope he ditches them totally. I love the fact that academic credibility is being addressed more fully in the blogosphere than it is in the university research and grant-writing industry (and perhaps even more so than in the “holy” academic publishing industry, with their massive journal holdings and impossibly high firewalls, with next to no transparency).

But the list of highly credibly academic blogging consortia remain, like History News Network (http://hnn.us/), Crooked Timber (lit, http://crookedtimber.org/), or Cosmic Variance (physics, now on Discover magazine http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/).

Chris

By: Saheli

Saheli — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 19:10:08 +0000

Nice write up, Robert. To me the telling thing in Pharyngula’s summary of the situation was his mention the lack of ‘technical support’ for the last year. That sounds like the kind of cost-cutting that, if done in a non-transparent way, will generate lot of friction with cumulative loss of good will, especially in a virtual work place where face-to-face interactions go a long way towards replenishing organizational good will.