Blog collective

I put up what is possibly the trolliest title I’ve ever come up with over on Sb DrugMonkey today. I did want to talk about Big Mechanism grants and the mind space the scientist has to be in to consider them. As a Project Director anyway. (And no, I’m not currently considering being a PD or similar insanity, thank you.)

In the current upheaval of ScienceBlogs, however, I’m seeing a trend by which if people are thinking “blog collective” they are thinking inward toward their respective -ology domains.

The re-launch of geoblog Highly Allochthonous is a case in point. Notice the domain name “all-geo.org”? Gee, I wonder who they are intending to collectivize? Also see the genomesunzipped collective started by Daniel MacArthur who may or may not be closing his Sb shop (hasn’t said, so far as I know).

In this they follow the Deep Sea News folks who left ScienceBlogs.com, well, an age ago in internet time.

juniorprof jumped the gun over at my Sb post and suggested I should form a blog collective.

Well, well. I think a Drugmonkey-led collective would be pretty cool. NIH biz and neuroscience perhaps? A key point would be recruiting writedit (IMHO).

Yeah. I have no interest in doing any heavy lifting. No Program Director of Bloggy Collectives for me. I have to say though, from where I’m pondering now, the idea of a collective focused on my blog interests holds little appeal. Don’t get me wrong, I tend to haunt these kinds of blogs preferentially. Grant game, careerism, academia. And I do wish there were a few more substance abuse blogs focused on the research side. But those are not the only people I want to associate with in a blog collective. I love the breadth of ScienceBlogs. I was a reader long before I was a contributor. The approach (in addition to specific blogs) was the hook for me as a reader.

So I’d want a little bit of that liberal arts tradition in any collective that I could envision as being attractive.