CHEMICAL BLOGSPACE HEADLINES

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Userscripts you forget about...

Peter writes about a Greasemonky userscript pop up:

    What are the Pg and Cb all over the TOC. When you bring up the page they aren’t there! What’s happened? Well the chemical blogosphere has posted about several articles here and mentioned their DOIs. The Blue Obelisk has developed a Gresemonkey script (which is a Firefox plugin) which reads the TOC and sees if any DOIs have been mentioned in the Chemical Blogosphere. And, in this case, three articles have been.

This is the screenshot he made:

For the obligatory statistics: Cb now discusses 1184 articles. Because I have trouble accessing the Postgenomic website, I cannot give that number :(

Wednesday, July 4, 2007

The rise of Chemical blogspace

The Chem Blog wrote about WTF is up with the Science blogosphere?, discussing a podcast on the chemical blogosphere, and wondering why it is larger than that of other natural science fields and mathematics. It is surprising indeed, because chemists generally are very conservative when it comes to anything to do with a monitor, mouse and keyboard. The argument put forward in the podcast is that there are a few strong voices amongst our blogs.

I am hoping the Chemical blogspace helps a bit too here. With about 40 unique users a day it is somewhat lower than it has been before the move to the new server, which was around 60 visitors each day, but I am sure this will recover.

The number of chemistry related blogs is rather large indeed, and the Cb counter is at over 136 now. Not every blog is equally active, but both the absolute number of entries and the number of active blogs per week are continuously increasing:


Interestingly, the blog had a very nice plot of the blogosphere interconnectivity. It is good practice to link to many other blogs and resources in ones entries, to keep discussions going, provide further information etc. Like Peter I was hoping that the plot would refer the Chemical blogspace, but it does not. This interconnectivity information is available from the Cb database, and I will try to create such a plot.