Friday, June 09, 2006

The Ever-Changing Blogosphere

A number of science bloggers I read (regularly or occasionally) are setting up shop at ScienceBlogs; notables from my sidebar are Chris at Mixing Memory and Coturnix at Science and Politics, who is combining several of his blogs into one, A Blog Around the Clock. ScienceBlogs isn't a mere addition to the blogosphere; it's a revolution, since it is changing how a small but formidable portion of the blogosphere works. HNN has, for quite a while, served a similar function for history blogging, but in a much smaller and less sleekly packaged way.

After a long period in which it had fallen into serious neglect, the TTLB Ecosystem has finally been reworked, with an expanded set of features. At present Siris is ranked #3439 in the Ecosystem (the rank changes as incoming links fluctuate). That's middling for the ecosystem as a whole, but very respectable for a blog that does not participate in any ecosystem community.

I'm currently working on developing a link archive for the Philosophers' Carnival. I have a number of ideas that I'll be trying out for it, but I'm also open to suggestions. The idea at present is just to provide a bit of redundancy for back-up purposes: twice now former hosts have closed down their blogs completely, thus sending the edition of the carnival that they hosted into oblivion. Richard caught one of them in time to be able to reconstruct it from Google cache; but the more recent case, the 19th carnival (at Mathetes), seems to exist no more. I'll be trying to reconstruct it out of fragmentary mentions\. If you had a post in that carnival, let me know.