This is an event that I can enthusiastically recommend. Their first one, 2007, was held on a cold day on the campus of the University of North Carolina. The energy made the air hum as scientist, science educators, and science journalists gathered to talk, share, and learn about blogging and other collaborative tools for doing and talking science. You can see a slide show of the sciencebloggingconference tagged photos at flicker here.
This year’s conference will be held on January 19, 2008 at the Sigma Xi Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The conference site is maintained on a wiki, and the program was established, in large part, by a collaborative effort of attendees. Most sessions will be unconference in style, meaning that we’ll be learning from each other.
Most of the folks at the conference will be from across North Carolina, but people have registered from as far away as California, Montreal, the UK, Sweden and Serbia. There will be gallons of coffee, hundreds of Locopops popsicles, tons of Bullocks barbecue and more, including vegetarian options, to feed us all.
To learn more, go to the conference web site and go here to register.
Hope to see you in January!
David,
The conference looks really interesting. Several of the topics look fascinating.
Will there be any science at the conference or is this more of an event dedicated to the issues surrounding writing and publishing about science?
What makes blogging about science different from blogging about any other domain?
I can’t really address your second paragraph, Gary, since I was not able to attend all of the sessions last year. But I suspect that you’re are correct, that it is mostly about writing and publishing
within(from) the science community.I don’t know if blogging about science is different. I really don’t. I’m not a scientist. But if there are differences in how scientists use blogs and educators or political pundits use them, the it’s scientists who will discover or invent it. If there are unique applications for people who want to spread the word of science to a world that is often ill-prepared to understand and sometimes even antagonistic to science, then science folks getting together to talk about it may be a good way to figure that out.
Hi David
I’m really confused about the existence of conferences about blogging. Isn’t blogging the medium, not the message? Isn’t it a tool through which content and communications flow, and not the content or communication itself? Isn’t this an overshadowing of the items being delivered by the method of delivery? Is Fedex itself more important than the packages it delivers using it’s excellent system of distribution?
Maybe it is. Or, maybe it is, only until the day comes when it is extensively used, accepted, and understood. A state which perhaps blogging has not yet achieved.
Jeff
Jeff,
You are right, blogging is the medium. But it’s a new medium to many, and scientists, as I said earlier, are especially challenged as communicators because their message is often complex and sometimes automatically suspect. So I think that examining and discussing blogging as a medium is important to science folks. It makes sense to me!
In a lot of ways, technology is a medium. But it is a powerful, evolving, and potent medium — and we go to conferences about it.
— dave —