Comments for Word Munger

Comment on “Upgraded” by Dave Munger

Dave Munger — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 13:45:08 +0000

I upgraded so that I could try out the twitter tools plugin. But I can’t get that to work either. Sigh.

Comment on “Upgraded” by EX

EX — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:47:12 +0000

If there are no security issues with the wordpress upgrade just wait for your theme author to upgrade his/her theme as well.
Some wordpress upgrades are more urgent than others.

Comment on links for 2010-09-07 by dave

dave — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:52:12 +0000

This was a test to see how Delicious.com works for auto-posting links. Just about what I thought, although the tags are a little odd. Apparently they don’t want you separating tags with commas — commas ended up integrated into the tags themselves, and I got separate tags for “Sensation” “and” “Perception.”

Comment on A first stab at a science blog aggregator by Robert Huber

Robert Huber — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 19:29:08 +0000

Very nice site!
I am running geobulletin, which aggregates >200 geoscientific blogs. If you find it useful,eel free to include geobulletin’s feed at: http://www.geobulletin.org/feed.php?format=atom

Comment on What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter? by Carla Casilli

Carla Casilli — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:54:16 +0000

I caught the back and forth between you and the other blogger, and I came away thinking the accusation, and its associated long rant, was a bit over the top. I attributed this response to the accuser’s youthful idealism. I also couldn’t help but think about that other blogger, “Some day, and it may be soon, you will be hoist on your own petard.” I hope not, though.

As to your point, “we don’t take tweets as truth” I agree with it in theory but not always in practice. Since there are studies that indicate frequency of exposure to some data (even if it’s false) may significantly influence thinking and perception (ingroup, outgroup—that sort of thing). In other words, it’s complicated.

However, in general, like you, I allow myself to drop into a less formal, less fully explanatory style when I feel that my audience will understand the reference points. Maybe this is laziness but I like to think of it as a sort of friendliness. Or maybe we’re all just victims of fundamental attribution fallacy. :)

Comment on What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter? by Dirk Hanson

Dirk Hanson — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 02:00:20 +0000

I always thought that tweets were meant to be more conversational, chatty, off-the-cuff, and informal–more like blog comments than blog posts. A tweet is not (I hope) the same thing as a headline on a post or a published article, although I do my best to make my tweets accurate, as do Dave Munger and DrugMonkey and most of the other people I follow in this sort of intellectualized digital version of CB radio we call Twitter…

Comment on What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter? by Maryn

Maryn — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:31:16 +0000

Since Francis Collins’ reaction to the ruling was to today suspend most of NIH’s stem cell grants, I think you were more on target than you anticipated.
http://blogs.nature.com/nm/spoonful/2010/08/stunned_nih_director_puts_embr.html

Comment on What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter? by JR Minkel

JR Minkel — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:27:21 +0000

I don’t sweat the wordings of my Tweets too much. If I express myself badly, I clarify with a second (or third) Tweet.

Comment on What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter? by Ed Yong

Ed Yong — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:25:50 +0000

I think that the same rules apply as with any other medium – aim for accuracy as far as possible. On Twitter, I think there’s an understanding that 140 characters will sometimes make it difficult for nuance and qualifiers to be properly used. And when there’s a link, you’d expect to find the full story there, so that the tweet is a taster for this content. Personally, I think your original was fine. I can see where DM’s coming from, but it’s not straightforward enough to start calling you out for inaccuracy.

I DO however think that journalists need to be very careful about checking WHAT they link too. It’s as much an important part of fact-checking as making sure that your writing is accurate. Have you seen all those “Top 100 Science Twitterer” lists that go around? Well look at this: http://blog.publish2.com/2010/01/05/nine-steps-to-verified-link-journalism/

Comment on What are a journalist’s responsibilities on Twitter? by rpg

rpg — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 21:24:41 +0000

Yeah… I try to craft things on twitter when it’s anything that’s likely to be taken seriously, but most of the time it’s just chatter.

I treat it a bit like pub. I certainly stand by things I say in meat-space pubs, but sometimes I hope it’s apparent I’m not serious. Of course, twittering from the work account (@f1000) is a different kettle of earwigs entirely.

Comment on A first stab at a science blog aggregator by Dirk Hanson

Dirk Hanson — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 17:15:48 +0000

Janet, I’m an independent blogger like you. Scienceblogging as a master aggregator is a wonderful thing, but it may spell doom for the likes of you and me. Granted, it would be a lot more work to sort out which independent bloggers to include than it is to build a site for existing groups. Nonetheless, one can’t help feeling as if a giant iron door is slowly swinging shut, and that the widespread assumption is that if you were any good at this and actually worth reading, you would have already been invited to join one of the science blog groups.

It could turn out that legit science bloggers who aren’t brand names and who can’t get inside may find themselves slowly starved of page views and forced to fold up shop. I get 20K hits/month under my own steam, but if scienceblogging takes off like it should, I expect to see that start to dwindle. We’ll see.

Comment on A first stab at a science blog aggregator by Janet Kwasniak

Janet Kwasniak — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 08:38:56 +0000

How do I get on your list of science blogs? I am not in a group of blogs. The blog is http://charbonniers.org/ and is titled ‘Thoughts on thoughts’. For a little over two years I have followed (and commented on) the news on scientific research into consciousness. The postings are fairly short and occur every three days. Currently I have about 10,000 visitors a month. If this sort of blog fit in with your list, please try and find a way to include it. Thanks.

Comment on A first stab at a science blog aggregator by Dirk Hanson

Dirk Hanson — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:01:28 +0000

Exactly what was needed–wonderful!

Comment on A first stab at a science blog aggregator by DrugMonkey

DrugMonkey — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 15:32:02 +0000

I think this is BRILLIANT!!!

Comment on Moby-Dick by Robbie Manson

Robbie Manson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 12:48:50 +0000

Fascinating insights into a one of the greatest novels ever written. You’ve nailed its higher meaning. For me, it is Melville’s lyricism, the rhythm of his language, the complexity of character that elevates it to the realm of the masterpiece. His message, as you say, may be relatively simple, even superficially trite when compressed to a page, but his way of delivering it is masterful.
Great work.

Comment on Some thoughts about science blog aggregation by The Dog Zombie

The Dog Zombie — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 13:27:34 +0000

What about using technorati? Bloggers would agree on tags for particular topics, and register their blogs with technorati.com. It will aggregate posts with particular tags.

I detailed how this would work here:

http://dogzombie.blogspot.com/2010/07/proposal-for-organizing-science-blog.html

As an experiment, I’m using the tag “meta-scienceblogging” for posts like this one. I don’t know if people will like this solution, but it’s available if anyone else wants to try it!

Comment on Some thoughts about science blog aggregation by Sandeep Gautam

Sandeep Gautam — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 06:44:01 +0000

the nature blogs seems a good solution, but I’m not able to subscribe to the feeds by topic tags (for eg http://blogs.nature.com/posts.rss?blog_tag=neuroscience) is not recognized by Google reader. Any clues what might be going wrong?

Comment on Some thoughts about science blog aggregation by dave

dave — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:06:26 +0000

Ah, indeed, that’s the sort of thing I’m talking about. Not bad. Is it possible to tag individual posts? Or does it simply use the generic tags you’ve provided for the blog as a whole? I’m not sure this site has quite the diversity of blogs that we have on ResearchBlogging.org, but as long as the infrastructure is there, maybe we just need to let more people know about it.

Comment on Some thoughts about science blog aggregation by Eva

Eva — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 20:39:13 +0000

I think Christina means this

Comment on Some thoughts about science blog aggregation by dave

dave — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 19:54:59 +0000

Christina, do you mean this page? That’s useful, but as far as I can tell there’s no active feed of the actual content from the blogs. I’m talking about something that would be more like ScienceBlogs, but with feeds of blogs from all over the internet, not a dedicated, invite-only site.

Mary, I tend to agree with you, but I think it’s a pretty daunting task even if you’ve got some skill with Python or Ruby on Rails. Maybe Drupal could handle it — my only experience with that was quite a few years ago. Maybe you should try it out — as I said, I think I could provide the list of blogs and RSS urls.