Saturday 10 May 2008

Moving to Science Friday & vote for new blog name

In January I met Talia Page and Ann Marie Cunningham of Talking Science at the Science Blogging Conference in North Carolina, and they invited me to write for Science Friday Blogs (the site is currently being re-vamped to be way more blogolicious).

I've always loved Science Friday--Ira Flatow's calming tones and fascinating guests used to help get me through Friday afternoon fruit fly ovary dissections in grad school--and I admire their ambitions, so I consider it a real honour to be asked to blog with them.

You can probably tell from my patchy posting here that Data Not Shown has been something of an experiment. I wasn't sure when I started it how many posts I'd end up wanting to write that weren't appropriate for The Beagle Project Blog, and I think the answer has turned out to be a resounding "not many".

So. I'm closing up shop here at Data Not Shown and re-inventing myself a little bit for the new Science Friday blog. I think part of the reason I didn't get really jazzed about Data Not Shown is that it didn't have a coherent and succinct theme. Thus my aims for the new blog are:
  1. to post regularly if not as often as I do on the Beagle Project Blog, say, once a week to start.
  2. to write themed series' of posts, for example a weekly biology and/or evolution glossary entry, a series of interviews with scientists I admire, or maybe even a series of video podcasts from the lab and other parts of the Natural History Museum.
I am also thinking of re-naming the blog. Please use the poll on the upper right side of this page to let me know what name you like best.

Thanks for reading and I look forward to seeing you over at SciFri blogs!

2 comments:

Kevin Zelnio said...

I actually liked Data Not Shown because of the story you told with it in your first post. A sort of non-specific name as such lets you have more flexibility with what you post.

Karen James said...

Thanks, KevZ, that does make sense. The same argument could be made for "in vivo" and to a lesser (or greater?) extent "in situ". "Class of 1859" is definitely more restrictive - I don't just want to blog about evolution and/or Darwin ... though someone did once say that "nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution". Anyhoo, it looks like the other voters agree with you.