Help! Where's the old Tenderbutton

Posted on November 19, 2006 by pm286

I have enthused about Dylan’s chemistry blog, Tenderbutton. Unfortunately for us, he closed down about a month ago. But I thought I would always be able to read the archives – they are wonderful record of chemistry as it happens – not the sterilized material in ritual publications. But now this grey literature has been closed – it is only available with a password and no indication of how to get one.
This is a great pity. One of the great regrets of my life is that we have lost much of the spontaneity of creation and discussion in the early days of the web. Here it looks like we could be losing a seminal part of the chemical blogosphere.
I’m guessing that the closure is to protect spammers, not because the “authorities” have removed it from view. But either way it will lead rapidly to decay. (We’ve essentially lost a whole journal – the Internet Journal of Chemistry – because of difficulties archiving.)
Why am I worried about a blog? It’s only a blog, not a proper publication, isn’t it? It’s not properly peer-reviewed. It’s only a graduate student writing it. It didn’t have official authorisation. Most of the readers were also graduate  students.
WRONG! It’s actually the start of new approaches in scientific communication. To me it is at least as valuable as the formal publications of synthesized organic chemistry that no-one other than organic chemists is interested in.
I was going to pursue this thesis but I needed the old TB material to refer to. In my opinion it should be deposited in the Stanford Instititutional Repository. It’s a work of scholarship and of great value to scholars.
(These opinions don’t necessarily transfer to every blog, but they do for most of the current chemical blogs).

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7 Responses to Help! Where's the old Tenderbutton

  1. yepyep says:
    November 19, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    The login is tender and the password button. He posted those before closing the site.

    Reply
  2. jd323 says:
    November 19, 2006 at 12:29 pm

    The passwords were posted inside the blog just before it was locked and I’m sure that a TENDER user could find the right BUTTON to press in order to access the site. 😉

    Reply
  3. pm286 says:
    November 19, 2006 at 1:07 pm

    (3) Thanks very much. Problem, of course, was that I stopped reading as soon as he announced closure.
    Continuing the theme – is it safely archived? Maybe I’ll find out when I login.

    Reply
  4. TomG says:
    November 20, 2006 at 10:15 am

    On the subject of whether it’s archived, try http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://blog.tenderbutton.com
    Although it does ask for the username and password initially, pressing ‘cancel’ lets you read on.
    Although the Internet archive doesn’t show links for January and December 2005, you can get to these by using the archived links in the sidebar of the blog, e.g. http://web.archive.org/web/20060211194935/blog.tenderbutton.com/?m=200601.
    As to whether it’s safely archived or not, I’d say no – the author can ask for it to be removed if they so wish http://www.archive.org/about/exclude.php

    Reply
  5. Mitch says:
    November 25, 2006 at 10:46 am

    Best to take down the username and password for access to Dylan’s blog. It’s no secret, but if it was meant for everyone he wouldn’t of password protected it. 😉
    Mitch

    Reply
  6. pm286 says:
    November 25, 2006 at 11:15 am

    (5) Thanks – I accept the argument. It’s probably too late now as blogs get copied automatically so changing this won’t change those. My current policy is that I don’t edit comments unless they are likely to be illegal in some way (although I edited out an answer to the mystery). So I generally automatically accept comments – I missed the implications of this one. (I expect there are considerable replications of tenderbutton throughout the blogosphere).
    It’s actually very pertinent to the question of digital curation. I assume that Tenderbutton’s motives were to preserve a copy of the blog in static form – effectively w:r– . This – as we have seen – is difficult other than to keep the blog in place but uneditable. I may be misguessing his motives – perhaps he wanted only those readers up to closure to read it.
    If nothing is done I suspect that the blog will decay and in – say – 10 years time will be effectively lost. Digital curation requires constant effort.
    P.

    Reply
  7. Mitch says:
    November 25, 2006 at 7:33 pm

    The blog will of course decay away. Blogs are typically written by people having very little experience making websites in the first place. I’ve always considered blogs as the geocities.com webpages of 10 years ago.
    That being said. I still maintain a geocities webpage and I also have a blog… :p
    Mitch

    Reply

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