Category Archives: blogging & bloggers

In Protest Of SOPA And PIPA

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This blog will go dark tomorrow to protest crimes perpetrated by people who know all about the internet aided by their toadies in government who know nothing of it.

From SOPAStrike.com:

On Jan 24th, Congress will vote to pass internet censorship in the Senate, even though the vast majority of Americans are opposed. We need to kill the bill – PIPA in the Senate and SOPA in the House – to protect our rights to free speech, privacy, and prosperity. We need internet companies to follow Reddit’s lead and stand up for the web, as we internet users are doing every day.

As a scientist and representative of Project Gutenberg, i.e. an internet user, I stand against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its more insidious older twin, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) winding their ways through Congress.

DMCA, ACTA, SOPA, PIPA, whatever you want to call it, extended copyright terms and draconian terms of punishment for use violation are not the worst the state of intellectual property has come to. Every single day, books, art and scientific results that belong to the public domain are actively stolen away from us, turned into copyrighted product and then “protected from theft” with the help of those elected to represent us in government. This is a serious breach of the social contract and absolute proof that our congresspeople have been bought. They now represent other constituents that go by MPAA, RIAA, IFPI and AAP.

Keep information free, especially that which was free to begin with, and help break down the bars of ignorance and illiteracy. Join the fight against SOPA and PIPA. It’s going to be a long one.

It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way, Google (Reader)

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Yesterday, Google released the overhaul of its feedreader, Reader, which features increased integration with Google’s relatively new answer to Facebook, Google+. If you like auto-spamming your Facebook or Google+ timeline with links to articles minus context or, in general, do not think of the internet as a space in which to share information in a thoughtful and meaningful way, stop reading now. If you are tired of another company’s sorry attempt at imitating Facebook in the absence of a proper platform and especially don’t want it interfering with great features that work for you and your community of friends, colleagues and readers, keep going. Even better, if you work at Google or know someone who does*, there are a few suggestions below that I would like implemented to make the internet a happy and safe place for information sharing once again.

I use Reader to:

- quickly access and read the latest blog posts and online magazine articles from feeds that I have bookmarked in the reader,

- organize these feeds into the folders of Geology, Geophysics, New Orleans, Science, Science Blogs, Technology and Visualization; share links to individual folders (bundles) with interested parties;

- share specific blog posts or articles either on Shared Items or by publishing them to this blog inside the Recommended Reading sidebar widget (simple list of hyperlinked titles of shared items) ALL IN ONE CLICK and

- share and DISCUSS items inside Reader with a specific group of WILLING followers who can passively join my Followers list and I theirs.

Now:

- access is really slow with increased load times; furthermore, the feed refreshes and displays the latest set of posts while you’re still reading previous ones,

- folders are still there and users can still create and share bundles,

- you +1 (instead of share) a post which then goes to a +1 page on your Google+ profile (complete with a Buzz tab that we are warned will be going away in a few weeks). Note that you not only have to create a non-pseudonymous Google+ profile in order to share Reader items, but also have to point your friends, colleagues and readers to the location of the +1 page, and

- once you’ve publicly +1ed the Reader item of interest, you have the option (which works on a PC desktop, works for crap on a PC laptop and not at all on an iPad) to create a post on Google+ to let your Circles know that you, Google+ user, have shared yet another article which is going to take up more of their screen real estate than is really warranted.

This, i.e. what used to be feedreader + Twitter + del.icio.us + publishable outside of Google space + all self-contained in terms of size and community,

has become this for archival:

along with this for sharing and discussion:

Instead of going from my blog to the article, the pathway has now become my blog –> my Google+ +1 list –> the article or my blog –> my Google+ stream –> the article. Archival? That’s right out the window.

Because all we need are more gates and gatekeepers between us and the information.

The Official Google Reader Blog explains these changes: “Integrating with Google+ also helps us streamline Reader overall. So starting today we’ll be turning off friending, following, shared items and comments in favor of similar Google+ functionality.”

I don’t understand why Google has to cancel one set of features in favor of another, unless it is to force users into Google+. Some argue that the social integration with G+ is something that they look forward to, which is great, but why not host a +1 button for G+ users as well as a Share button for those who do not want to utilize Google products socially?

Which brings us to the fundamental difference between the two: signal to noise. As I said on a G+ post this morning to which not a soul responded (probably because it drowned in the sea of re-re-re-re-re-shares of Rick Perry’s “drunk” speech – QED):

Along with the tremendous amount of white space, the signal-to-noise ratio of content is already very low at Google+ which is why I also don’t hang out at Facebook much other than to comment on other folks’ posts (when I find them in the noise there) or to make short throwaway posts myself. Now, folks sharing their Reader items here without context makes it even more noisy and unreadable.

Congratulations, Google, you have succeeded in sacrificing internet meaning – content in context – for more internet clutter in a silly attempt to reproduce Facebook, and in the process really pissed off a bunch of scientists, bloggers and internet users who, until yesterday, happily utilized Reader as a staple of simple, one-click, high signal-to-noise sharing and discussion. You just can’t have this in Plus.

Garrett Guillotte sums up for me:

Even if every Reader feature made it to Plus — and shit no they haven’t, and it doesn’t look like they will — the entire concept, culture and process is completely different. You can’t remotely replicate the closed, tight, context- and content-first communities of Reader in Plus. You can’t efficiently or effectively share, excerpt, annotate or discuss a 3,500-word longform news article on Plus alone without opening at least two other tabs.

Some suggestions for Google:

1) Please help us publish our +1s outside of Google+ via a “shared feed.” All you have to do is build a “Share This On Your Blog” embed utility into the +1 page.

2) Please replace the “Note In Reader” bookmarklet with a +1 bookmarklet. What if I want to +1 an article published on a website that doesn’t use +1 buttons? And, no, they’re all not going to add the +1 button to their websites/pages, just like they didn’t “Facebook This” or “Tweet This.” Give it up.

3) Can we go back to refreshing feeds as we did two days ago? I would really appreciate the page not cutting to all white and then repopulating itself with new material, all while I am in the middle of reading something.

4) Please don’t let this become your version of what Yahoo! did to GeoCities.

Functionality over mediocrity. Tremendous usefulness over killing useful features. These should be internet mantras. Ultimately, there is just no need for another Facebook, which is itself far from perfect (and, in fact, on the quest to completely confuse the hell out of its users). But, a utility that can be Facebook, feedreader, Twitter and Pinboard/delicious to many and in the doses that they want? Now THERE is a gamechanger.

Who do you want to be, Google? Figure that out first.

==
* The guy who engineered the Google+ Circles model and I went to the same high school years apart. And what am I going to say? “Hey, fix this or I’ll stuff you in your locker.” We were a bunch of nerds who would have all been stuffed in lockers in a normal high school and we didn’t even lock our lockers.

***

Related:

Brian Shih | Reader redesign: Terrible decision, or worst decision? “The closest analogue might be if Twitter made it so that 3rd party clients could use the Retweet functionality to push Retweets to a user’s stream — but only allowed you to consume Retweets on twitter.com.”

Donors Choose And ROCK!

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The 2011 Science Bloggers for Students online charity challenge was once again a smashing success thanks to all of you who donated. The overall drive brought in more than $51,000 from 698 people. Ocean and Geobloggers brought in around $3100 of that money to which you guys contributed $585 $645!

In order of donation date, thanks and high-fives go to:

  1. The Donors Choose team
  2. Anne J.
  3. Anita C.
  4. Julie H.
  5. Anonymous Donor Fairy (who gave $100 – yeah!)
  6. Janet S.
  7. Chris R.
  8. my very own D
  9. Craig C.
  10. Rusty H.
  11. Anne J. (again!)
  12. Elizabeth B.
  13. Lynn C. and
  14. Cynthia D.

The fourteen of you reached 519 students, got four earth science classroom projects fully funded and helped four others get started! I want to take this opportunity to thank Janet Stemwedel as well, for once again organizing us science bloggers into doing something tremendously useful.

A note to those of you who donated during the last three days of the drive: Gift codes will arive via e-mail. How the match is calculated and issued to you is detailed here. As gerty-z says, “THIS IS FREE MONEY, folks. Let’s make sure the kids see every last penny.” Just because the Science Bloggers drive is over doesn’t mean individual classroom projects have expired as well. I highly encourage you to donate to one or more of these four projects:

An interesting observation about the projects that did get fully funded before October 22nd: They all have ROCK in the title. Keep On ROCKing In The Free World, Rock Stars, Rock Out and Science ROCKS! Tuck that idea away for next year, earth science teachers.

Thanks again to all of you who gave. I’m making *sparkly eyes* at you.

Please Give To Science In Classrooms!

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Yes, it’s that time of year again when I beseech you, dear readers, to donate to the DonorsChoose Science Bloggers For Students online charity challenge that helps high-poverty science and mathematics classrooms in need. There is a lot less fanfare and competition between us science bloggers this year, but classrooms are more underfunded than ever. The challenge runs from October 2nd to 22nd this year.

Last year, this blog raised around $500 with a dollar-for-dollar match by HP. At the conclusion of the last challenge, I said, “A simple $1.50 per child living in poverty can make the difference towards a better and slightly more equipped science education.” This is still true. Also read some of the thank-you letters from teachers whose classrooms benefited from your donations through this very page last year. One from a teacher in Illinois puts it all in perspective:

… In addition to increasing the modes of instruction in my classroom, the projector has been an invaluable resource due to the limited budget and high poverty experienced at my school. Several students at my school cannot afford necessary eyeglasses and struggle seeing writing on whiteboards when sitting in the front row. With the new projector, I can zoom in on text to allow all students to read important information. Additionally, my school is struggling to afford paper and toner for the copy machine. We have gone weeks at a time without being able to make copies. The projector allows me to display the required instructions, problems, graphs, and tables so the students can learn and practice new skills.

Please peruse the projects on my 2011 GIVING PAGE and please, please, PLEASE consider giving even $5 to a project of your choice. Let’s support American science education even if (and especially because) the government and private sector couldn’t care less!

Scientists On Twitter, Treme Bloggers

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The American Geophysical Union’s blog interviewed a number of physical scientists on why scientists should use Twitter. My response reflects two important requirements I have of science: that it is increasingly inter-disciplinary and shares findings with the public as much as possible.

***

OffBeat Magazine: Treme Bloggers – Ray Shea and I were part of an hour-long roundtable discussion convened by Alex Rawls on the topic of HBO’s Treme. I liked this exchange in particular.

Me: … Sometimes it worked because I’m partial to bounce, but sometimes I felt like it was kind of forced in, “Okay, now we’re gonna have two minutes of ass-shaking.”

 

Ray: “I had no problem with that.”

Blogs, Newspapers, Your Arm, Whatever. Just Write.

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Bora Zivkovic: “Not all bloggers want to be journalists.” Bora talks about science blogging in particular, but you could apply his explanation to any discipline.

I’d like to add that those of us in New Orleans in late 2005 learned quickly that if we didn’t blog, many local and national journalists would write a limited or outright false narrative for us, not stray from it even if evidence arose to the contrary and repeatedly drum it into the minds of the rest of the nation and world. Following that, actual policy, rebuilding solutions and national slogans would be based on this manufactured consensus reality, these prevailing but rather shaky premises. *shudder*

Again, it’s not just about controlling your message, but keeping in mind that what you put out there has very real consequences, such as the information and reactions of very real people. A lot of perspectives then in many different voices is a good thing. As Ed Yong said just today, once again with respect to science but immediately applicable to your area of expertise, “We’re all aware of the problems of mainstream science reporting. It’s not all bad. I reckon most of it is probably quite good. But it could be a lot better. And scientist bloggers have the potential to make it a lot better.”

As blogging versus/as journalism is brought up again (for some unknown reason – thought we buried this dead horse some time in 2006), it’s important to read a recent post by Mark Folse. For those of you who don’t know Mark, he is a former ink-stained wretch and current poet-author-blogger who has published newspaper articles, books and blogs.

Blogging is a category so generic as to be almost meaningless. It would be like calling all writers “bookers”. If anything, this bit of the Internet has evolved from a sort of cork-board of odd pictures and moments into something else, just as Wet Bank Guide evolved from an exercise in explaining Katrina and the Federal Flood into one of explaining New Orleans.

Journalists wanting to be bloggers. Bloggers wanting to be journalists. Oh, enough already. Take my advice: Your knowledge and your voice. Take it and just write. Write for whatever reason makes you want to write and don’t let anyone define writing or blogging or tweeting or next-big-thinging for you. Write your heart out regardless of format, word count or number of readers. Just write.

Coming back to the holy/holey narrative, how many of you scientists or science lovers began to blog as a direct result of crappy, but more importantly, spineless, agenda-based science reporting in major newspapers and cable news? Check these out: Memo To Scott McClellan: Here’s What Happened and The Smithsonian Defends Censorship. You, blogger, journalist, whatever you call yourself, don’t have to belong to the Catholic Church Of Journalism if you don’t want to. You don’t have to give in to “We were afraid for our jobs, funding and continued existence, so caved to whatever demands those in power placed on us.” You can sack it up and tell it like it is.

What is the heart of journalism really, other than love and respect for (ferreting out) information and getting it out there to as many people as possible with as little pretense and fanfare as possible? He who ceases to be a student was never a student. Let’s concern ourselves more with the content and less the form and, yup, just write.

P.S. As long as anyone gets all uppity about what blogging should or shouldn’t be, what posts should or shouldn’t include and OMG The Internet Is Serious Business Journalism With A Capital J, I will include images of LOLcats in any post on this topic. Peace out.

Give Me Ideas For A New Professional Women Geoscientists’ Network

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I belong to a professional geophysical society whose executive committee has proposed the formation of a women’s network. Similar networks are American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ PROWESS committee and Society of Professional Engineers’ Women’s Network.

Why bother? Who’s going to fulfill your energy requirements, for starters? Consider it a staffing problem.

A large hurdle for geoscience is the growing inability to attract and retain excellent scientists, in general, but women, in particular. If the requirements and perception of women scientists are not acknowledge and acted upon soon, we stand to lose valuable professionals to other more attractive but perhaps not as fulfilling professions. The continuing double standards for women with family and the identifiers used to describe women scientists need addressing, especially in the male-dominated field of geophysics. Women can use mathematics and physics to address the world’s energy needs just as well as men can (some even more so) but refer to us as “sympathetic and nurturing team players” as if that’s a bad thing or “on the mommy track” and see how far that gets us. More critically, how does it grow the profession?

You don’t believe that this happens today? Forget the men (and women) who think women who wish to raise families while working have no place in the workplace and check this: Just a couple of days ago, I had to dispatch a guy who joked that the name of our proposed professional society should include a “snarky reference to Mother Earth, periods and emotionalism” and continued with “Gaian Cretaceous chocolate-bingers.” Why are menstruation, our feelings and pink sparkles the first things to come to professional male minds about professional women, when the known reality is that we, too, are … hold on … professionals who do not operate on these terms when at work?

This is the overt bullshit we’re up against, along with the stealthy and unspoken kind.

Many young female geoscientists have already benefited from the sense of community created by women in the sciences, both through professional and online networks. As they move beyond school and into the workforce, they hope to keep those ties strong. Furthermore, women currently in the geophysical workforce can continue to provide support and growth opportunities to one another.

So, this is my query. In the year 2010, armed with the learnings of various women’s societies to date, research into women’s issues and online tools such as Twitter, Facebook [insert obligatory "Yuk!"] and forums, what would the must-haves of your science-focused women’s professional network be?

Here are some suggestions that have come in so far:

  • Include networking strategies explicitly to identify and support mentoring connections.
  • Partner with an established network.
  • Encourage the mingling of academics and industry professionals.
  • (This one’s mine.) Encourage social media less for recruiting and more for actual conversation like in the geoblogtwitosphere. It’s so much more organic and honest, i.e. what we really need, when it isn’t formal and enforced.

What else? I’m all ears. Oh, and don’t say the network needs women. It’s been done to death and many of the folks proposing the group are actually men. There are male feminists, remember?

Suggested Reading:

Thank You, Donors Choose Participants!

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As you can tell from the sidebar, the 2010 Science Bloggers For Students fundraising campaign is officially over. Anna Doherty of Donors Choose sent us some wonderful news today:

I wanted to send out a HUGE THANK YOU for all the awesome work that went into making Science Bloggers for Students a success.  472 citizen philanthropists contributed more than $36,000 to help more than 23,500 students – yippee!

Ocean & Geo Bloggers readers contributed $3918 and YOU, my reader philanthropists, raised about $500 of that admirable amount. It simply amazes me how good we can be and that a simple $1.50 per child living in poverty can make the difference towards a better and slightly more equipped science education. All it takes is each of us pushing, giving, loving just a tiny little bit.

Wait, there’s more! Don’t forget the HP match and your gift cards. Anna continues:

The HP [dollar-for-dollar] match will be distributed shortly.  You’ll see the impact stats on the Science Bloggers for Students Motherboard take a big leap, and every donor who gave through the challenge will receive a unique philanthropic gift code to redeem on a DonorsChoose.org project of their choice.  I hope you’ll encourage your readers to use that code so the funds don’t go unused!

Your work is not done, rock stars. (Our work is never done.) And, after that, please continue to visit Donors Choose through your new accounts to give to any classroom of your choice.

Awesome science-loving friends and readers. I have them!

DonorsChoose Blog | Science bloggers helped oh-so-many students!

Why Blogging Still Matters

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O’Reilly Radar interviews Anil Dash on the enduring power of blogs

… That was the promise we had when we all first discovered the web. Someday it would bring us all together and we’d be able to have these conversations. It’s not perfect. It’s not ideal. But in some small way here’s somebody like me — with no portfolio, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school, I didn’t have any fancy social connections when I started my blog — and it has opened the door to me having a conversation as a peer, as somebody taken seriously, in realms that I would have never otherwise had access to. That’s the greatest privilege in the world.

Ten or eleven years of blogging and I still don’t have any fancy social connections, just really tight ones, and sure hope no one takes me seriously unless I ask you to, but Anil Dash reminds me why some of us started doing this. Just to talk. And, maybe someone – a kindred spirit or worthy adversary – would hear us. Or not. Whatever.

For the first four years of this blog’s existence, it had no commenters. In the last six, I’ve made excellent friends, individually and in often-intersecting groups, online and in meatspace. (Apparently, the intersection of desi, geology/science and New Orleans is where it’s at. Two turn tables and a rock hammer.)

The blog is what it is. Most days, the posts write themselves. On others, I heave something up there to justify the hosting fees and to prove that I’m not gone. The conversation, the meaningful exchange, the smack talk, even the quiet diary, is always here to be had, though, and that’s what keeps this medium evergreen and attractive.

Communication. Opinion. Access. Exchange. Democracy. This is what blogging symbolizes to me and why Net Neutrality is more important than ever.