This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American
Today is the first anniversary of the Scientific American Blog Network!!!
Expeditions blog has been on our site much longer than one year, on the old platform, but has really taken off in your interest (and traffic) only fairly recently. The concept of the blog is unusual. On one hand, it requires some reader loyalty - in order to get the whole story, you need to keep coming back again and again. On the other hand, just as you get to know the authors, the field trip is over! During the busy field season, we may have as many as four series going on simultaneously. In off season, there may be nothing here for a month or two. Yet you keep coming back!
We have had dispatches here coming from Arctic and Antartica, from Alaska and from Greenland. People sent in their regular posts from ships looking for squid, ships looking for plastic in the Pacific Garbage Patch, ships drilling cores in the bottom of the ocean, and ships looking for plankton. The USC Dornsife Diving instructors and students reported from Guam and Palau on two consecutive years. So did MSU program that sends mainly Native American students to study dinosaur eggs in China. Perhaps you really enjoyed the search and discovery of new species of jumping spiders in Borneo. We'd like to know who you, the readers of this blog, are and what are your favorite series so far.
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Four years ago, Ed Yong started a tradition, picked up by many science bloggers, to ask readers who they are and why they keep coming back. He just did it again recently. So we thought it would be interesting to ask you the same questions (#1 and 2), as well as question #3, later added to the tradition by Drugmonkey, and a fourth question devised specifically about this blog.
Commenting here is really easy (and will become even easier by the end of the year). "Registration" is a misnomer, it's just a login on a separate page from the blog post. When you click on "Register" you are taken to a page where you give us a name/nym, an email address and a password. Pseudonyms are welcome. Then you come back (there is no confirmation email you need to wait for, etc), click on "Log In" and enter the same name/nym and password and are ready to commment. Please do - here are the questions:
1) Tell us about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.
2) Tell someone else about this blog and in particular, try and choose someone who’s not a scientist but who you think might be interested in the type of stuff found in this blog. Ever had family members or groups of friends who’ve been giving you strange, pitying looks when you try to wax scientific on them? Send ‘em here and let’s see what they say.
3) Where did you come from? I'm interested in whether you found us, or regularly follow us, through Twitter, Facebook and/or other beyond-RSS mechanisms that you may use to corral your information stream.
4) What is it specifically about Expeditions blog that you like? What field trips do you remember well? What series of posts did you especially like? What keeps you coming back again and again?
