ScienceBlogs Network Reviewed - Part 3: The D's - Page 2

Dispatches from the Culture Wars is by Ed Brayton, a "freelance writer and businessman". This blog is an exceptionally fine example of intelligent critique, of the public examination of ideas and their effects. Topics range from Intelligent Design, through Civil Liberties, Law and Politics. It's a fairly broad sweep, but what holds it together is the probing analysis, presenting real-world incidents, examining reality. It's a fairly feisty forum of inquiry; always a ton of comments presenting alternate angles and drawing new evidence. It's an active and engaged place, and represents the best spirit of vigorous debate. The main page is well-laid out; with sizable chunks of each post presented; you click through to read the whole thing, and you get the comments at the same time. Categories aren't used all that consistently; many posts aren't classified at all. Entertaining, eclectic, challenging; Ed lives up to his billing as a modern-day Plato. Recommended.

The following two blogs are mediocre. Deltoid is a blog by Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales in Australia. A self-appointed debunker, Tim blogs about whatever happens to catch his interest at any particular moment. Stuff ranges from global warming through to critiquing journal articles. Tim claims to find flaws in other people's arguments and then gets super angry. He climbs the pulpit, and starts raging. He declaims, he gets aggressive, he undermines. I find it totally unpalatable, and its the sort of stuff you read in the letters section of tabloid newspapers. Pretty mediocre.

Discovering Biology in a Digital World is Sandra Porter's blog. In her own words, she is "a microbiologist and molecular biologist turned tenured biotech faculty turned bioinformatics scientist turned entrepeneur." And her passion is "developing instructional materials for 21st century biology." Sounds alright, until you have to read her blog. Her scattergun approach of turning here, turning there, turning up, turning down, is just befuddling. It's just a mishmash, a mess, totally incoherent. There is a supposed central thread of microbiology and genomics, but it's like picking random pages from a textbook. It's updated daily, but I think that makes the problem even worse. Highly mediocre.

The following two blogs are crap. Dr Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refugee: crap is a fairly relative term. It might be me talking crap, it might be me talking crap about someone else's crap, or it might be someone else writing crap about my crap. In the end, it's all crap. But you have to admit, some things are crapper than others. Dr Joan is a "biochemist and a minion of the dark lords of pharma" and she collaborates with Kevin and Jim. Menage a trois doesn't work in real life, and it doesn't work for blogging. It's just everywhere. No coherence, no focus, no sense of purpose. Three people blogging away in all different directions. Collaborative blogs are hard things to pull off, and if you want to study how to do it, go read GigaOM. There has to be a clear delineation between authors, with a clear end goal; team effort guys.

Article Author: ggwfung

Ideas Man
because punditry never dies

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