On Saturday, Oct. 22, I was honored to be part of a panel at the 2005 conference of the National Association of Science Writers. This panel, “Blogs and RSS” was organized by my friend and feelow content strategist Merry Bruns. (Thanks a bunch, Merry!) My fellow panelists were:
- Carl Zimmer, who writes the life sciences weblog Loom for Corante
- Joel Shurkin, a longtime science journalist who recently began his personal weblogs Of Cabbages and Kings and Yussel
With permission from all panelists and NASW, I recorded that session and I’m now podcasting it as promised. Sorry it’s taken me a couple of days longer to post it than I’d planned, but my original recording wasn’t that great so I had to do a fair amount of editing to make it listenable.
LISTEN NOW! Right-click or click-and-hold that link to download the MP3 audio file. Its about 17.8 MB and runs about 80 minutes long.
You can download my handout, too. It’s a one-page pdf document.
Public information officers and PR people please note: Although this talk was geared mainly toward science journalists, much of what we had to say applies as much to (if not more to) public relations.
Show notes, including an important correction I need to make: I was wrong about how I described a tool for monitoring web site statistics…
CORRECTION: Urchin is not free. In the Q&A, someone asked about site statistics tools such as Sitemeter, a popular free tool that Carl Zimmer mentioned in his talk. I mentioned that for my site statistics I use Urchin, which I love. It is quite sophisticated, and very usable. It really does tell me everything I want to know about how people are finding and using Contentious. I described Urchin as a free, open-source tool – and on that point I was very wrong.
As Carl subsequently pointed out to me, Urchin costs $199/month – definitely not free. I’d been under the impression that is was free because my husband gets Urchin for free. See, Contentious is hosted on a server leased by my husband, ubergeek Tom Vilot. The server is actually owned by EV1, and that company has licensed Urchin and makes it available to the people who lease machines in its server farm.
I’m sorry for the misinformation. I thought it was free, and I didn’t realize it was part of a packages of services. Anyway, since that information was wrong, I’ve edited out that part of the audio file to avoid confusion.
Also, I edited out Joel Shurkin’s demonstration of how to post to blogger. In an audio-only context, it just didn’t work. But Joel did a great job.
MY FAVORITE QUOTE: In his talk, Carl Zimmer says:
“People who start a blog and don’t have a commenting function – I just think they’re cowards. I mean, if you’re going to be out there, you’ve got to have a real blog. Everybody else does! It’s kind of pathetic to be a professional journalist and feel like you can’t handle the heat. All those amateurs out there allow comments, and that’s what makes a blog really interesting, because it’s a conversation.”
Amen, Carl. If you blog without comments, you’re just a hobbit. 
MORE LINKS: I gave links to several relevant sites and resources in this posting, including links to good examples of science blogs.
OLD STORIES: In this session I referred to two earlier flaps involving blogs that I’ve written about before: the origins of Rathergate and “fake news” video news releases paid for by the US federal government.
Enjoy – and many thanks to NASW for inviting me to be on this panel.
