Living in the Blog-osphere

August 18, 2002 7:15 PM

Living in the Blog-osphere MSNBC Science and Technology takes blogs more and more seriously. First, they created their own blogs, including some which were already discussed here from the start, for example a Science and Technology Weblog Cosmic Log by Alan Boyle, now articles in the upcoming Newsweek print issue. Are they really onto something here? Are blogs going to be good official forums to present news fast?
posted by neu (8 comments total)

Since no one has really said this, I would just like to say that I hate the term Blogosphere. Yes, its nice to see lots of people adapting new technology. Just don't call it the Blogosphere. It sounds so damn self-important.
posted by insomnyuk at 10:17 PM on August 18, 2002

Science and Technology Blogs list
LQ Net Science Blogs list

Example of a quick blog for presenting useful info fast:
Prague Floods Update Blog
posted by sheauga at 12:59 AM on August 19, 2002

Reality Check: 99.9% of the nation, to say nothing of the world, doesn't care about blogs. So, as compelling as a small fraction of blogs are, they ain't replacing the traditional media. Sorry, hope your ego can deal with it.
posted by ParisParamus at 4:56 AM on August 19, 2002

insomnyuk: I don't like the word any more than you do. It was in the title of the Newsweek article - I cannot change that at this point.

Thanks for the Blogs lists sheauga.

ParisParamus: whose ego are we talking about now? Scientists report their results at meetings, then carve them in stone in peer-reviewed papers (some of the time with their best friends as reviewers :-) ) but they are not very good at sharing all the details of their life daily with competitors. So although most of them have static home pages, and they update those often enough, I doubt that many of them plan adopt blogs.

What's intriguing is how interested journalists have been in this phenomenon lately. You cannot say that the past few months were slow newswise, yet they wrote so much about blogs.

ParisParamus the spell-checker insists on changing your login name to Prosperous.
posted by neu at 5:14 AM on August 19, 2002

...now articles in the upcoming Newsweek print issue. Are they really onto something here?

Yep. It's called selling magazines.

I can't believe the Cosmic Log links to Art Bell from under the heading of Tech & Science. Art Bell is the opposite of science. He belongs under a crackpot heading.
posted by quirked at 6:38 AM on August 19, 2002

The Art Bell link is recent. It's not listed on the Cosmic Log page cached by Google in July.
posted by neu at 8:51 AM on August 19, 2002

Quite recent actually. Look at this page:

http://216.239.35.100/search?q=cache:dv-kUdU1x_wJ:stacks.msnbc.com/news/750150.asp%3F0bl%3D-0+cosmic+log&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

Alan Boyle wrote about crackpots quite recently.
posted by neu at 8:55 AM on August 19, 2002

insomnyuk, i agree, the term blogosphere sounds like the dorky non-geek affectation of a blogger come lately, it needs to die.
posted by yonderboy at 1:02 PM on August 20, 2002