Check out this new science blogging aggregator: ScienceSeeker.org.

From their website:

There are thousands of science blogs around the world, written by active scientists, journalists, professors, students, and interested laypeople. But until now, there hasn’t been a good way for readers to sort through all of them. There are dozens of blog collectives, many sites that organize some of the information in the blogs, but none that attempt to encompass the entire range of science reporting, analysis, and discussion taking place at an astonishing pace, worldwide.

ScienceSeeker is our effort to fill that void. We have collected hundreds of blogs in one place, and invite you to submit even more. Our goal is to be the world’s most comprehensive aggregator of science discussions, all organized by topic.

A vast number of carnivals already exist. Fascinating ones and content are found on The Giant’s Shoulders, on classic science papers, Carnival of the Mathematics (although I understand nearly half of it), Four Stone Hearth on anthropology in the widest (American) sense of that word, Cabinet of Curiosities, and The Skeptics Circle.
A longer list is found on Coturnix’s blog.

Unfortunately, I’ve been unable to find a blogging carnival on sociology or social sciences in general. Therefor, I now introduce the Curving Normality Blogging Carnival on Quantitative Social Sciences. It aims at showing of the quality that can be achieved by properly applying quantitative methods, and what these have to offer to the social sciences as sociology, communications sciences, anthropology, economy, development studies, and all that I forget.

For the time being, this website will be the host, and new editions will appear every 1th of the month, with a deadline three days before that. You can write something new, but I’m sure you’ll have some interesting posts lying around just waiting for a larger audience. You can e-mail me, or use the comments below.

So, please send me your links to your posts on quantitative social sciences and find them aggregated in one of the upcoming editions of the Curving Normality Quantitative Social Science Carnival.

Though you are safe in principle because of general copyright protection by law, there are two peculiarities when it comes to copyright protection on blogs. First of all, you can easily re-date posts on your blog. But, this means that others can do so as well when they steal your blog articles. This is where MyFreeCopyright.com comes in. The service from MyFreeCopyright.com is very simple: once you sign up, your RSS-feed is scanned for new articles, to which a unique identifier is assigned. These keys and the text from your articles are stored in a central archive, and you receive an e-mail containing the identifier for your own administration. Having that, and of course the date on which it was created, you can always prove that an article is yours, and that you wrote it prior to the date that someone else claims to have.

The second problem on the web is to find infringements of your copyright. Doing this yourself on the massive web, and doing so repeatedly, is virtually impossible. So, Copyrightspot.com does this for you. Still in early stages of development, the functionality is very basic, but very effective. You enter the URL of your blog, and then the servers of Copyrightspot.com scourge the internet to find (pieces of) the articles that originate on your blog. Very soon, you’ll find yourself confronted with a list of web-sites that have copied (parts) of the text on your blog. Unfortunately, you can’t create an account (yet? Remember that it is still in early development), so no information on prior queries can be stored. This means, that when repeat your search for copyright infringement, you’ll need to go over the same infringements again and again. This is especially burdensome when you allow specific sites to mirror your content. Very welcome features for new versions would be to create an account to save the results of your searches, the possibility to exclude specific sites from the search, and to tag specific infringements that were found as ‘OK’.

Overall, the combination of MyfreeCopyright.com and Copyrightspot.com provides a valuable aid in protecting your blog’s content. Copyrightspot.com finds infringements of your copyright, and MyFreeCopyright.com helps you to prove that the content is actually yours. So, if you’re serious about blogging, I’d say go and sign up and start using these free services.

Researchblogging.org is a non-profit initiative, and provides in a web-based gathering of posts from weblogs on science. Not all posts are gathered (‘aggregated’) though, only the ones that explicitly address research that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. In that, it distinguishes itself clearly from similar (collections of) scientists’ blogs, for everything else but the research itself is left out. This is achieved by having bloggers to administer their posts on the researchblogging.org website manually, after which some PHP-code is provided. This code is added to the blog-post, resulting in a bibliographic reference to the article that is discussed, as well as the aggregation of the article to the researchblogging database.

For me, this results in a very interesting collection of blog-posts, that are nicely categorised and stored in a searchable database accessible though the web. And this is where the new version of researchblogging.org becomes really interesting, because next to a visual update, new features have been added. Bloggers now can categorise their posts manually, making them easier to find by prospective readers.

More importantly, though, is the ability to ‘flag’ posts by readers. I find this very important, for not all posts are that great, to my opinion. That is, they are very nice to read at times, but without a strong focus on peer-reviewed research. An often encountered format is someone writing about a topic, and then adding a reference to an article loosely related to that topic to get it aggregated. In my opinion, posts on peer-reviewed research should explicitly discuss the findings and the quality of the research design. Sure, good journalism requires the author to add some context to the article, or even a little pun, but the thoroughness of the critical review should not be lost. So, I think it is a good development that readers can now more easily whether posts on researchblogging.org truly address peer-reviewed publications in a critical manner.

Personally, I have been writing for researchblogging.org for a few months now, which has resulted in a modest number of articles (find a selection here). Every time, I have found it a challenge to critically think about the research I like and to detail that on my blog. This way, I have found a new way to discuss the quality of work, and to bring to attention work that I appreciate to be especially valuable. Incidentally, these posts are among the best read on my blog, so apparently the effort pays of. I cannot remember writing about research I completely disliked, although once I wrote about a completely horrendous research design, and contrasted it with one I did like. It is more difficult to do justice to articles that have been written and researched very well, than to break down the ones that did a very bad job, so evidently I’m taking the more difficult approach.

Blogging on blogging on peer reviewed research

So, all in all, how serious should we all be about blogging on peer-reviewed research? No new findings will be found on blogs, or it should be on the web-sites of journals who pre-publish a high profile publication. New insight on existing articles may be found though, and I did so myself a couple of times. Academic mores being what they are, the really important new findings, insights, and perhaps criticism will not be written down on a blog, but send to a peer reviewed journal.

But then again, there will always be a minor, but inherently social aspect to science. From that perspective, reading blogs about science is an easy way to read about what is going on in the journals you don’t normally read, or even in disciplines other than your own. Personally, as a sociologist-to-be I very much love to read about evolutionary biology, the developments regarding CERN and the search for the Higgs-particle; all things I don’t read about in the ‘real’ journals. You’ll never know in what way some insight may come in handy in one of your own future projects.

I don’t think that science ‘needs’ a site like researchblogging.org, but I do feel that it is just another way for science to open up, both to other scientists, but also to non-scientists who are interested in cutting-edge knowledge. The registered blogs are (generally) open to all readers, unlike the actual journal articles that are reviewed. In that sense, it is a form of bringing science to the masses.

Accompanied by interpretation, that is, which might seem to be a problem for some. Researchblogging.org is not only open for readers, but also relatively open to those who want to participate. Are all blogs true representations of the body of knowledge accumulated in the annals of science journals? Of course not, but how far do we want to go in restricting bloggers’ access to Researchblogging.org? Or, in other words, how open should the system be?

On researchblogging.org there is quality control when you apply to join the initiative. Your blogs needs to be in existence for a while, and some posts should already be present. Also, there have been some discussions on the forum about the appropriateness of some posts. I already discussed my disliking a specific type of posts, but some sort of solution has already been implemented in the new version. Also, one of the conditions to participate on researchblogging.org is that your blog should accept comments from readers. In this way, readers can share opinions, and discuss interpretations and conclusions. So, this system is not as closed as peer-reviewed journals are, nor is the quality control as strict, but I think this is rather good: in this way we have an semi-organized way of discussion the quality, interpretations, and merits of articles published elsewhere.

Conclusion

I think that Researchblogging.org provides many with excellent means of sharing ones’ thoughts on scientifically published journal articles. The quality of the contributions is generally high, as is the degree of representation of various disciplines. For me, this helps me in finding out about interesting articles or even interesting (sub)disciplines I wouldn’t be aware of otherwise. I hope its’ popularity will only increase with the new version, as to be able to find even more interesting posts on interesting articles.

Do you blog about peer-reviewed research? Sign up, start writing, and I’ll read you there!

I can’t think of a nicer place than the useR! conference to find my single reader. Or, at least, one of the not-all-that-much readers. He appeared to be a sociologist, quite involved in the German ‘blogosphere’.

We ended up having lunch, while discussing differences between the Dutch and German sociological community. Apparently, there are not that many differences. Both have had a debate between proponents of quantitative and qualitative methodologies, and in both countries the quantitative groups seem to have ‘won’ the discussion, in the sense that quantitative methods are gaining in influence and relative number of users.

Interestingly, he was amazed by the openness of American professors such as Douglas Bates, whose session we had both attended. When I attended the ECPR conference in Rennes, France, I had a similar discussion with a German PHD-student. It seems that in Germany the distance between student and professor is indeed a lot larger than in other countries.

Well, B., should you read this: it was nice meeting you, and hopefully we run into each other a couple of times more during the conference.

Devesigned by ‘automattic‘, the same people who wrote the WordPress code (“code is poetry”), released their WordPress application for iPhone today. I downloaded it and found myself writing this post within a minute. Really, that’s how well it works! The app has been redesigned and in nothing it resembles the WordPress admin screen.

The interface allows thevuser to sign up for several blogs. I only had to fill in the URL, my user name, and password. When logged in to one of my blogs, thirty of my recent posts are shown and can be easily read and edited. Using a single button, a new post is created, including a title field, categories, and tags. All the categories created on my blog were shown on my iPhone, but it is also possible to add more categories on the run. Drafts are stored locally, so that you can write even when not connected to the internet.

Not all that is possible from the WordPress admin screen, can be done using the iPhone app. For starters, you can’t do anything but write a blog post, but I feel that in that limitation the strength of this app lies. Some other limitations are due to the fact that we’re writing from an iPhone: for instance I don’t see myself writing posts with a thousands of words length due to the relatively small keyboard.

Some other things might perhaps be added to future versions of this app, however. For instance, it is at present not possible to add a link to another page or blog on the web. Also, you can’t manually change the permalink of the post, nor can abstracts be added to the posts.

All in all I find this app strongly suited for writing a quick post on your Worspress blog. No long and detailed academic posts can be expected to be written using this app, but I do believe that it is very well able to result in nice concise contributions. Especially in a dynamic environment where you don’t want to be lugging around too much equipment, for instance on a conference, I see how this WordPress app can be put to great use.

Soon I will be attending the useR! 2008 conference in Dortmund. I already planned to do some conference live-blogging, so now I have found myself the tool to do so.

I must admit that I repeatedly feel flattered by the number of page-views on my blog as shown by the WordPress statistics plugin. However, despite the nice graphical representation, they are a little too flattering for the humble number of page-views my blog attracts. A traditional line-graph consists of two axes. Traditionally, these are referred to as the x-axis, and the y-axis. To say it bluntly: the wordpress statistics plug-in messes up on account of both axes.
 

Problems with the Y-axis

Regarding the y-axis, representing the number of page-views on a specific day, the problem lies with the numeric limits of the axis. In other words: in every representation the minimum and maximum value on the y-axis differs, which is especially problematic regarding the minimum value of the axis. When I try to discern a trend in the humble number of page-views on my blog, I’m often mislead due to this problem.

Let’s take a look. Today, I saw the graph represented below on my WordPress Dashboard. This graph clearly shows an increase in the number of page-views since June 5th. At least, so it appears. When we take a closer look at the y-axis, we see that it starts at 10, instead of 0. Is that a big deal? Yes it is. This means that the graph only shows 80% of the total reach of the graph.

About ten minutes later a new day started which resulted in a totally different graph, as shown below. Still, we see an increase in the absolute number of page-views, but now the slope of the line seems to be less steep. Instead of a clear increase, we now see more clearly a relatively stable number of page-views of about 30, with an initial dip and a peak at the end of the selected time-period. Reason for this is the completely different values used to represent the y-axis. This results in a graph which is a lot less optimistic for my blog.

Problems with the X–axis

Regarding the x-axis, representing the dates on which the page-views were registered, the problem lies with the absence of dates on which no page-views were registered at all. This seems to be an even more serious problem. Again, I’ve added the graph created by WordPress statistics on one of my blog-posts. It shows a recognizable pattern: the most page-views on the day it was published and after that a steady decline. However, a superficial review of this graph would lead to the conclusion that readers have found this blog-post once or twice a day after that.

 

But, is that a valid conclusion? No it is not. A more detailed view of the graph shows that there have been many days that no-one at all viewed this post. Below, I’ve printed a bar-chart that also shows the days with 0 page-views. Again, it shows an image a lot less optimistic regarding my blog.

 

How bad is it and can it be solved?

Is this all that bad? Well, it gives the users of WordPress a positive feeling about themselves. But, for those who want a realistic overview of the success of their blog, the image given by these stats is not all that helpful. The more page-views a blog has, the worse this problem becomes: the plugin adjust the y-axis to show the absolute variation in number of page-views as large as possible, thereby overestimating the relative differences. The problem with the x-axis is highly problematic for the posts that are rarely visited.

Should this be adjusted in a next version of the plugin? Well, that’s a point for discussion. I can image a few people disappointed when their optimistic images turn more realistic. Nevertheless, I would suggest that the folks at WordPress at least would add the possibility for users to manually define the limits of the axes. Or, at the least, allow users to select the visualization of days that no page-views were registered on the x-axis and to have the y-axis start at zero.