In case you aren’t reading them yet, take a minute to check out these relatively new blogs by scientists:

BdellaNea
A blog about leeches — Mark Siddall (American Museum of Natural History)

Evolutionary Novelties
A blog about evolution, with a soft spot for ostracod(e)s and eyes — Todd Oakley (University of California Santa Barbara)

The Rough Guide to Evolution
A blog loosely accompanying a soon to be released book of the same name — Mark Pallen (University of Birmingham)

Chance and Necessity
A blog about evo with a twist of devo — Anonymous “Faculty member in the South”.

At least three of these bloggers are high end researchers, so do have a look.

The move from Blogger to Scientific Blogging has been good overall, and I am certainly enjoying more hits and a broader readership from outside the normal blogosphere. However, I have also noticed that bloggers and blog readers have more or less dropped off. I think it would be useful for Genomicron to reach both audiences, but it seems that one Genomicron can’t serve that function yet. Perhaps when the new format of SB is operational it will. Meanwhile, I am opting to resurrect the pseudoGenomicron and have it persist as a functionally redundant parablog. That is to say I will be cross posting everything on both sites, and blog readers who like this one better can read it and people who want links to lots of other interesting stuff can visit the other one. It will be a little more work, but worth it I think. The Feedburner feed will use the original Genomicron so it can have full posts.

If you prefer the other version, it’s here.

Just a quick thanks to everyone who has been wishing Genomicron a happy one year anniversary, either in the comments, or on their blogs. I’ll list them here for some link reciprocity:

• Sandwalk [Happy birthday Genomicron]
• Pharyngula [Congrats to Genomicron!]
• Further Thoughts [Genomicron’s first blogversary]
• Greg Laden [Genomicron is one]
• Eye On DNA [Eye on DNA headlines for 11 April 2008]

If you have a link and I missed it, please let me know.

As hard as it is to believe, it has now been exactly one year since I launched this blog more or less on a lark. Since then, I have come to view blogs as a legitimate apparatus for public outreach, and have found participating in the blogosphere useful not only for conveying information to readers about my area of study but also for keeping me updated on interesting new research in fields peripheral to my own. I have made some new friends, learned a great deal, and, I hope, delivered some interesting and useful posts. I am grateful to all of you for reading the blog (especially those of you who visit frequently or have subscribed to the feed) and to my fellow bloggers who have linked here. I think the fact that people are reading the blog shows that there is demand for scientific information, and that people are eager for interaction with those who spend their time generating it. I hope that other professional researchers will continue to adopt blogging as a supplement to publishing in the far less accessible scientific literature.

I intend to continue with this experiment in blogospheric outreach, and I hope that Genomicron continues to evolve as it has over the past year — I hope you will continue to read along.

I was actually intending to give Nimravid a plug as a newly discovered (by me) blog that is worth a look. Given that the latest post is a detailed discussion of my paper on understanding evolutionary trees, I think it would be appropriate to do so now. It’s a very nice blog and has many interesting posts — so do give it a try.

ERV points us to an interview in Wired where Carl Woese argues that we should stop teaching evolution in high school because it cannot be dealt with properly at this level. ERV is, um, unhappy with this. My take is posted here.

I am always glad when people let me know that they appreciate the content of the blog. My posts tend not to generate much in the way of comments, and aside from the occasional email I don’t really have a good sense of how the blog is perceived. But every now and then a fellow blogger is kind enough to let me know in some especially interesting way. Case in point, the Golden Mouse Award that was kindly bestowed upon Genomicron by Bertalan Meskó of ScienceRoll.

Now, Ian Ramjohn of Further Thoughts has been kind enough to pass along the latest E for Excellence award. Thanks, Ian! Update: Adrian Thysse of Mystery of Mysteries has named Genomicron as well.

In return, I will point out that I have some of the brightest readers around.

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