This is just to mention that I have been blogging for this site for exactly one year.
During the last twelve months here I have observed a few changes from the old blog which I ran at wordpress. First of all, being hosted in Scientific Blogging extended my readership. However, I also lost some regular readers, probably ones who deem a site running commercial ads not worth reading. I specifically remember some of them, who contributed frequently to the comments threads in the old site - Fred, Guess Who, Tripitaka, Jeff ... The list is long. Too bad, it's life. Growth, I am convinced, only happens through change.
Yet maybe the most noticeable change as I moved from the old blog on wordpress to this site was the fact that science reporters, for the largest part, do not consider me any more an independent source of information, but possibly more like a competitor. This much I gauge from the fact that my phone conversations and email exchanges with people from Nature (the magazine, not the bitch), Physics World, New Scientist, the New York Times, and such have abruptly decreased in rate.
I must say I regret that. The purpose of this blog, I have always held, is to bridge a knowledge and information gap. Interviews with science writers on newspapers and magazines helped this mission, because I could contribute to a more precise reporting of the scientific results I discussed in the blog. Of course, the press offices of CERN and Fermilab are more than adequately equipped to perform the same function, and my colleagues sitting as conveners of the physics groups in the experiments can do as good a job as me, if not better: thus I am not too worried.
Again on the positive side, Scientific Blogging is a community of brilliant writers and insightful minds, and belonging to it is definitely an asset and it produces dividends in culture and knowledge. Plus, there are ideas of writing an anthology... It will be a wonderful book, and since I have another book in the pipeline, the editorial operation may turn out useful for me. Time will tell.
