Technology. 3d_printer. ScientificAmerican. Themes. BibliOdyssey. The Economics of Blogging and The Huffington Post. When The Huffington Post announced earlier this week that it was being acquired by AOL for $315 million in cash and stock, one group felt slighted: a set of unpaid bloggers for the site, identifying by the Twitter hashtag #huffpuff, which claims that The Huffington Post has “built a blog-empire on the backs of thousands of citizen journalists.”
Some analyses in the mainstream media have echoed these sentiments. “To grasp The Huffington Post’s business model,” wrote the Los Angeles Times’s Tim Rutten, “picture a galley rowed by slaves and commanded by pirates.” I have enormous sympathy for anyone writing about public affairs, whether as a hobby or as a career. And I’d encourage people to think very carefully about where they are doing their writing, and what they are getting paid for it. The fact is, however, that sentiments like Mr. The Huffington Post receives huge amounts of traffic: about 15.6 million page views per weekday, according to Quantcast. Thoughtomics! Hello and welcome to Thoughtomics!
My name is Lucas Brouwers. I am a Dutch science writer with a background in molecular biology and bioinformatics. After obtaining my MSc degree Radboud University in Nijmegen, I decided that a science career is not for me. I am currently employed by a Dutch daily newspaper where I write about biology. Thoughtomics is a blog about evolution. I selected some posts from the previous incarnation of this blog to give you an idea of the kind of topics that interest me. Please note that English is not my native language, so I might make the odd spelling or grammatical mistake every now and then. So why is this blog named ‘Thoughtomics’?
The banner of this blog was made by Joep Gerrits, a talented artist and friend. As small and insignificant as it might seem, this sketch is the first depiction of evolution as a branching process, without any direction or order. See you around! Image credits:Darwin’s tree from Wikimedia Commons. Mídias Sociais. Uma piada antiga diz que, quando há relâmpagos no céu, os argentinos olham para cima e sorriem, porque Deus está tirando fotos deles com flash.
A brincadeira, que faz parte do relicário brasileiro de piadas sobre a ambição dos vizinhos hermanos, pode ter um quê de verdade. Pelo menos em se tratando de um argentino específico, ele está olhando para o alto e sorrindo. Domingo Montanaro, 31 anos, quer chegar lá e já tem motivos para acreditar que isso será possível. Montanaro acaba de lançar, no prestigiado SXSW — evento de música, cinema e tecnologia no Texas (EUA) onde despontaram Foursquare e Twitter — a rede social Gabstr, e já anunciou, sem modéstia, que pretende que sua criação seja um futuro Twitter ou Whatsapp, mirando o sucesso de Mark Zuckerberg e o Facebook. Em 15 dias, o número de usuários já chegou a 1.500. Por enquanto, uma das limitações é que a pessoa não consegue enxergar o que acontece em outro hub do outro lado da cidade, por exemplo.
[por Mariela Castro]