The Intersection Moves, Male-Gaze Follows

So by now, you have noticed that the Kirsh and Mooney of The Intersection have moved from the Seed Media blog enterprise to the Discover magazine one. Adjust your bookmarks! In this they follow the prior move of Carl Zimmer of The Loom. In case you are wondering what the Discover magazine blog effort is all about, a Columbia Journalism Review bit published a few days ago overviewed the Discover blogs and leaked the move of what turned out to be The Intersection.

When a team of investors, led by Bob Guccione Jr., purchased Discover from the Walt Disney Company in 2005, one of the first things the management team did was build a significant Web presence, according publisher and CEO Henry Donahue. Within the last year, the site has added a feature called 80Beats, which aggregates and analyzes daily science news, and a number of “outside” blogs. In addition to Zimmer’s blog, Discover picked up two others: Cosmic Variance, run by a group of astrophysicists, and Bad Astronomy, run by Phil Plait, a former researcher turned full-time blogger. Both of those were formerly independent, but next week the site will add another “top-ten” blog from the Scienceblogs.com community.

The Professional is Personal

A recent episode of typical concern trolling of a science blog blipped up over at White Coat Underground, where PalMD has been rocking the daddy blogging of late.
Commenter Bill Williams expressed the following thoughts:

… I read science blogs to enhance my understanding of nature and scientific methods. …Obviously this is your blog and you can do whatever you like. I’m sure I speak for others when I say that too much fluff with lower your readership, i.e., I am likely to unsubscribe. Thanks for the great work (when it really is work).

Pretty standard nonsense around ScienceBlogs, wherein the commenter kindly notifies one of us that our blogging content is not what s/he would like to see. To which the response is usually a jawdropping disbelief that anyone thinks that we blog to satisfy their personal view of what the blog “should be about”. Don’t let the door hit ya where the good FSM split ya, is the preferred response.
Nevertheless, I see something a bit more interesting in the specific reason for this person’s objection to PalMD’s blogging.