October 20, 2005 – 9:10 pm
Consensus has always been a crucial aspect of how science gets done, and consensus pretty much requires conversation. Therefore, since blogs are such a great tool for conducting the public conversation, you’d think scientists (and science writers) would be all over the blogosphere, right?
Apparently, not so. While there are some very good blogs by scientists and science writers, this is definitely not a crowded corner of the blogosphere.
On Saturday I’ll be speaking on a panel at the annual conference of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW). The topic is “Blogs and RSS. Science writers Carl Zimmer and Joel Shurkin, both of whom blog, will be on the panel with me. I’m looking forward to it.
While I’m there, I hope to encourage more science writers to at least start reading weblogs, and to seriously consider creating their own blogs. They are media people after all. It makes a ton of sense for anyone involved in the media to use weblogs to build reputations and relationships.
Here is my handout, and also some links that might interest the attendees…
October 20, 2005 – 5:22 pm
…It’s just decided to move itself.
Yes, if you look to your right, you’ll see that the sidebar for this blog (where I have my site search and many other goodies) has mysteriously shifted down to the bottom of the page.
I have no idea why this has happened. I didn’t mess with any of my page templates. I removed my two most recent postings and the problem was still there (I’ve since replaced them.)
This only happens on my home page. If you click to read a full article, the sidebar’s right where it’s supposed to be.
Sigh… I have no idea why it’s doing this and right now I don’t have time to diagnose it. This problem just started today. I might not have time to really plow into this problem until Monday or Tuesday. If any Contentious reader has suggestions about what to check in the meantime, I’m all ears.
October 20, 2005 – 11:38 am
Many people are still struggling with the concept of feeds (RSS, Atom, whatever). I don’t blame them. Feeds are not exactly intuitive to your average person (even your average net user). The profusion of bad jargon, cryptic icons, geek elitism, and klunky tools for feeds haven’t exactly helped, either.
In my experience, once people grasp the concept of what feeds do, it’s then easier for them to understand how feeds work – which then helps them actually start to use feeds.
This is why explaining why feeds matter was the core of the talk I gave yesterday to a public relations group. I’d been asked to speak on the future of technology – and it seems to me that if people can grasp the feed concept and start using feeds, then most of the communication technologies that are likely to become crucial over the next several years will make much more sense.
Over at The Intuitive Life Business Blog, my friend Dave Taylor is struggling with a similar issue. I just read his Oct. 18 posting, “What we needs is a great metaphor for RSS,” and commented on it.
I agree with Dave, we do need a great metaphor for this linchpin technology/channel/medium. I’d love to hear what Contentious readers have to say about this issue – especially since so many of you have managed to “get” the feed concept that the e-mail alert service for this weblog is now on hiatus.
Here’s what I said in my comment to Dave’s post…
October 20, 2005 – 9:27 am
Continuing my quest to rid my house of unnecessary paper by finding a decent document management solution…
When I last left it, I was saving my scanned documents as pdfs, and then using the annotate tool in the Preview program of Mac OS X Tiger to add comments, keywords, etc. to documents as needed.
A Contentious reader pointed out that it’s probably not a good idea to mix metadata with the content of a document. Yes, that’s a good point – since those annotations do become permanent parts of the document.
This morning I stumbled across yet another feature of my laptop’s operating system that probably will be much better (for my purposes) than pdf annotations: Spotlight comments…
October 19, 2005 – 6:32 pm
I just got back from speaking at a half-day event offered by the Colorado Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America. It was fun! PRSA pulled together a great program.
My talk was on: The Future of Technology: What PR Pros Need to Know. I published my handout for this yesterday (downloadable pdf).
LISTEN NOW! Right-click or click-and-hold to download the MP3 audio file. It’s about 10.3 MB, and runs about 45 minutes long.
SHOW NOTES: Here are a few items that might interest people who were at this event or who are catching it online…
October 18, 2005 – 2:38 pm
Tomorrow morning I’ll be giving a short talk at an event offered by the Colorado Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA). The event is “Communications, Technology, and the PR Professional,” and my topic is “The Future of Communications Technology.”
Because the talk is short and the topic is big, I’ve pulled together a fairly meaty and non-geeky handout. Here are a couple of highlights from that handout…
October 17, 2005 – 10:44 am
Some longtime Contentious readers have written me lately to ask why I haven’t been publishing my e-mail summary of this newsletter for a few months. The answer is, I’ve had to set that aside due to a lack of time.
Here’s the deal: The vast majority of Contentious readers currently find out about my new content via feed. My e-mail audience, while important, is much smaller.
Also, to be frank, the people who tend to hire me generally find and read me via feed. I very rarely get business from my e-mail newsletter readers. I’m an independent self-employed person, and I have to prioritize my time according to what helps build my business the most.
I’d still like to offer the e-mail summary edition. However, I honestly can’t take the time to produce it. So here are two options to allow it to continue. Let me know which you prefer…
October 17, 2005 – 10:31 am
OK, this is old news. Admittedly, I was slow on the uptake.
I just noticed that you can now get Google News Alerts by feed. (What’s a feed?) Apparently this new service just launched over the summer.
So what? Well, now you can do a keyword search on Google News (a free service which aggregates news stories and press releases from thousands of sources). Then you can subscribe to a feed that will continually deliver to you a steady stream of new matches for your query. These results will come to you through your feed reader so they won’t clutter up your in-box.
Here’s some how-to info and a little background on the puzzling history of Google and feeds…
October 15, 2005 – 6:43 pm
So here’s the thing: Someone close to me, one of the the kindest and coolest guys I know, was just diagnosed with leukemia. Fortunately, they caught it fairly early. Today, the kind of leukemia he has is very treatable.
I’m mentioning this because his doctor detected this condition during a basic annual physical. His early symptoms were not something that most people would have associated with such a serious condition: general fatigue and pin-prick marks on his chest. Who would have looked at that and thought “leukemia?” Not me.
But to a trained physician, “body language” has a whole different meaning…
October 12, 2005 – 10:07 am
This morning, as I’m sipping tea, it occurs to me that Mac OS X Tiger does allow me one possible solution to my document management dilemma: annotated pdfs.
Here’s what I’m thinking…
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