Blogging Blogging…

TotallySynthetic has just posted Blogging…  where he exults over the growing chemical blogosphere. I share this enthusiasm. He also implies the reinforcement effect – if you have N blogs that are linked there are N*N links and this makes the blogosphere more valuable than all the single blogs. For example his readership is likely to be predominately practising synthetic chemists – this blog has (inter alia) a readership interested in scholarly communication. So they get to see his blog and vice versa.
I have linked to his post in this post so his blog should reference this post. That means that his natural readership should link directly to this post. (This is – I think – called a pingback). If I get it wrong I’ll repost.
What this means is that we are creating a new chemical information tool. It is very powerful in that we can do whatever we want (within the laws of libel, etc.).  For example I have posted a simple bibliometric study on whether the compounds in his blog are interesting. The synthetic community is starting to respond. I hope some useful new views will come out of it.

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3 Responses to Blogging Blogging…

  1. pm286 says:

    Yes – it works. Within 30 seconds an excerpt from my post was displayed in the comments to Totally Synthetic’s Blogging.. post. So readers of that blog can seamlessly visit this one if they fell like it. As I have been urging greater cross-fertlization in chemical thinking, this should be a great help.

  2. Bill says:

    One comment on trackback pings: ‘ware spam! I had to shut mine down, as have many bloggers, because I refuse to have my blog used as a billboard for porn and I could find no technological fix that was sufficiently effective and reliable. Even comment moderation ceases to be effective when you are being asked to approve or delete a thousand attempted spambacks per day.
    On the other hand, looking around my blogroll, it seems that trackbacks are making something of a comeback (*groan*). Perhaps the latest blogging platforms deal with spambacks more effectively than my old version of MT did, and I should give it another try.
    I agree that trackback is a wonderful conversation tool, and since in my view blogs ARE conversations I’d be pleased to find that spam was being held at bay.

  3. pm286 says:

    (2) Thanks Bill, I was warned about this but haven’t been yet had a problem. I started getting quadratic spam but installed Akismet and it seems to be very good (although it very occasionally puts useful posts in the spam – yours, for example!). I get about 100-200 spam per day and the false positives and false negatives are running at < 1%. However the spam is pretty uniform and maybe there is worse to come.

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