Seeking science-y reading?

Check out scienceseeker.org.

Not standing still, the developers of scienceblogging.org have tried to improve upon what they offered.

The differing names of the platforms nicely reflect what they offer to the visitor.

Where scienceblogging.org is organised around the platforms that offer science writing, scienceseeker is organised around the topics.

Scienceblogging.org, by contrast, is naturally biased to the networks or collectives: single sites that host several writers, like this one.

An early criticisms of scienceblogging.org was lack of support for independent bloggers.

While the initial cast of blogs on scienceseeker is biased to networks, a registration scheme allows independent bloggers to sign on. Tweets from registering independent blog sites at scienceseeker say the registration process is straight-forward–encourage your favourite blogs to sign up.

Those whose blogs are already listed (like ours’) should ‘claim’ them.*

You can browse blogs by topic (left-hand column) or scroll down the list of posts (most recent at the top). Each article is listed by topic, title, blog site and date. You can subscribe to a RSS field for each subject topic, which I imagine will be popular.

Scienceseeker also has a section for photos (at top, via Flickr) and a twitter stream (right-hand side). There’s also a news blog, including open discussion on further developments and a call for assistance (if you’re a developer).

There are benefits to both schemes. If you’re looking for the last handful of posts from a particular major platforms, scienceblogging will serve you well. (Although some might feel the page has now grown too long for a quick-reference index.)

If you’re seeking something to read, scienceseeker’s topic-based approach should prove better and, as the independents sign on, you’ll cover a wider sphere of writers.

This new effort is on-going. Among other things, topics are per blog site at present, rather than per article. The developers hope that this will change over time; this from their ‘About’ page:

This site is a work in progress. Consider it to be the first step in our effort. Blogs are categorized according to a fixed list of topics. You can see lists of posts from those blogs, but since many bloggers have wide-ranging interests, some of the topics might not quite fit. Ultimately we plan on categorizing not by blog, but by individual post. We hope to have other ways of arranging posts as well: just the best posts, chosen by experts; the most popular posts; posts about particular events.

So head on over and give it a whirl.

Update

If you use twitter and you really want to drown yourself in tweets notifying science-y reading opportunities, follow @SciSeekFeed. (For the less crazy, you can take (RSS) feeds of topic areas rather than the whole caboodle.)

Science bloggers who would like the details displayed on ScienceSeeker revised (or corrected, if that’s the appropriate verb) can use this form.

Those wanting to tweet to ScienceSeeker can send messages to @SciSeeker. (Now manned my @BoraZ, as if he doesn’t already have enough to do!)

Footnotes

* Register an account, login, then go to the Member blogs page to view the alphabetical list of blogs.

Other articles at Code for life:

Science blogging aggregated and streamed

Finding platypus venom

Book sales, frumpy readers, and mental rotation of book titles

How long does it take you to write a science blog post?

Quips from ScienceOnline2011

Who blogs on what, and why