ScienceBlogs so far

I’ve been officially blogging on ScienceBlogs for three days now, and I wanted to give my first impressions. First off, this is an amazing collection of science writers. I’m familiar with most of them from their previous blogs, but having all of them in the same place just makes a huge difference.

Why? The ScienceBlogs home page is a masterful design, giving just enough of a snippet of each blog post to let you know if you’re interested, but not so much that you can’t see plenty of posts at a time. While I prefer to keep my browser window set about 800 pixels wide (this design is probably closer to 950), the right-hand column is mostly ads, and isn’t usually needed to navigate the site.

Second, the site has a powerful server, so I’m assured that wherever I click, the site will load quickly and correctly. No more clicking on links and trying to decide whether they’re worth a 20-second delay to view the content.

Third, I know each of these blogs has been pre-vetted by the folks at Seed Magazine, so quality is not going to be an issue. These are veteran bloggers with a proven track record.

It’s possible that the bloggers are just showing off for their grand entrance, and that once we get into the grind the quality will drop off, but I think that by being members of this fabulous community of great bloggers, we’re all motivating each other to be better writers. I didn’t visit most of these blogs even once a week before we were joined together at ScienceBlogs.com, but now I notice new posts within minutes after they’ve been made. I know the other bloggers are reading my posts as well, and I don’t want to disappoint them.

Right now, it’s easy to display just the blogs in a certain category (Cognitive Daily is the only “cognitive science” blog so far), or to search one or all the blogs in the group. In the future more interactivity is promised — a way of finding posts within the community relevant to a hot topic, or even searching comments threads, so that discussions can extend across different posts and blogs. I’d like to see a sort of meta ScienceBlog, where a human (or group of humans) distills the posts from across the consortium to bring more even more interactivity to the table. Whether any of that comes to pass, it’s already a remarkable tool.

I don’t know yet how many readers we’re bringing over from the old site — the stats package isn’t installed on the new site — but based on the comments we’ve received so far, I suspect our numbers haven’t declined much. Interestingly, the numbers for cognitivedaily.com haven’t declined at all. Perhaps most people haven’t updated their bookmarks, and so click first on the old site and then follow the handy-dandy link I’ve provided to the new site.

I’ve also done a Technorati search to see what others are saying about ScienceBlogs. Right now, most of these links are just people updating their bookmarks to Pharyngula, but some bloggers have noted that all the “elite” science bloggers have made the move to ScienceBlogs, and worry that a class system may begin to emerge. I worry a bit about that, too — after all, why would I click on an external link when staying within the system has all the advantages I describe above? But ScienceBlogs isn’t through yet — the goal is to have 40 or so blogs, so there’s room for more (but not all) science blogs.

Others complain about the “bland” design, or the small typeface. These aren’t particular issues for me — CogDaily was pretty bland before, but some of the pre-ScienceBlogs did have excellent designs. Most of the complainers say they like the old Pharyngula better — but I have to disagree with them. The new Pharyngula loads faster and looks far better than the old design. There is the issue of dull uniformity — all the ScienceBlogs look the same, and I suppose it could get tiresome after a while. However, I’ve heard rumors that new templates will be made available for the sub-blogs in the coming weeks, so I suspect some of these issues will take care of themselves.

Where I think ScienceBlogs.com will have the greatest appeal is with nonscientists — people who don’t actively surf for science all the time. It’s an easy, convenient way to find exceptionally high-quality science writing online. Now my only problem is finding time for all my other reading.