An advantage of being in charge of the website for Evolution 2009, the joint annual convention of the American Society of Naturalists, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution: when I suggest that we ought to do something to involve science bloggers in the conference, I get to set it up. Or maybe that’s actually a disadvantage.
In any event, we’re experimenting with a blogswarm for this year’s conference – if you’re attending the conference and think you’d like to ‘blog about it, or just want to help spread the word, head over to the just-posted blogging page, download a badge to put on your site (see my sidebar, and the inset on this post, for examples), and drop me an e-mail so I can add your URL to the list of participating science blogs. I’m also interested in suggestions, both conceptual and technical, for how to improve the resources at that page, which currently consist of a small selection of logo badges, and the list of participants – I’d particularly like to try aggregating relevant posts from participating blogs into a single RSS feed.
With blogging becoming more common as a way to educate the public and converse with other scientists, I hope this will improve Evolution’s profile outside academic biology and facilitate conversation among attendees before, during, and after the conference. Also, as a colleague (who shall remain nameless) pointed out, this should make it easier to organize the kegger.
Reference
S.A. Batts, N.J. Anthis, T.C. Smith (2008). Advancing science through conversations: Bridging the gap between blogs and the academy. PLoS Biology, 6 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060240
Sounds like a great idea. Have you seen Saunders et al. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263 on microblogging the ISMB conference using FriendFeed?
It might also be fun to have a Twitter feed. Not sure how many evolutionary biologists use Twitter, but the EvolDir Twitter account I set up to tweet EvolDir emails has a slowly growing number of followers. It’s also another chance to use the e09 logo to good effect.
That’s a good idea, Rod – I hadn’t thought of it, but Twitter makes all sorts of sense for sending program updates &c during the conference. And it turns out that evolution2009 was available.
Great. I’ve tweeted about it on @evoldir, hoping to reach the (slowly) growing evolutionary biology Twitter community.
I wondered what had happened to prompt this morning’s burst of “follow” notices. Thanks!
Now, if the conferences staff can only get registration online …