Sciencebase is now on Scintilla, the science blog portal from the journal Nature. It’s worth checking out and with the help of the site’s guru Alf Eaton, I got a couple of minor technical issues quickly resolved.
One of the key features of Scintilla you will discover as you browse its myriad science blog listing is a neat little box that shows up offering you a list of similar sources. It does exactly what its name suggests and provides links to other sites with content that is likely to be closely related to the blog you are currently reading. “Those are actually calculated based on what users are subscribed to (‘people who subscribed to Sciencebase also subscribed to…’), rather than content,” Alf told me.
So, what do you get while reading Sciencebase on Scintilla? Well, at the time of writing, there were several blogs already listed in the Sciencebase links section, but to save you the trouble of searching, I’ve listed them here:
- Nobel Intent
- Pimm – Partial immortalization
- The Sceptical Chymist
- Omics! Omics!
- Mining Drug Space
- The Biotech Weblog
- Kevin, M.D. – Medical Weblog
- RealClimate
- The Science Creative Quarterly
- Public Rambling
I could have linked directly to the blogs, but then you wouldn’t get Scintilla’s neat little chart showing how often each site is updated, nor would you get access to the list of sites that are in turn related to each of these. Scintilla also provides the average wordcount for a site’s posts as well as a popURI.us widget that shows Google PR, Alexa rank, Yahoo links to the site, and the blog’s backlinks according to Technorati. Such data is interesting, but usually only to the blogger themselves.
For instance, Sciencebase has a Google pagerank of 7 and has almost 2000 technorati backlinks, for what that’s worth. Also, I’ve posted 205 times since February 3, 2007 with an average of 343 words per post. See…I told you it would only be interesting to the blogger in question.
I’ve not checked to see just how closely related to Sciencebase these other blogs are, but I am sure there is definite topic overlap, given the diversity of subject matter I try to cover here and have attempted to justify in a recent post on critical acclaim.