{"id":195363,"date":"2010-01-18T13:49:20","date_gmt":"2010-01-18T18:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.discovermagazine.com\/loom\/?p=2230"},"modified":"2010-01-18T13:49:20","modified_gmt":"2010-01-18T18:49:20","slug":"scienceonline-as-the-minnesotans-say-%e2%80%9cuff-da%e2%80%9d-the-loom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/195363","title":{"rendered":"ScienceOnline: As the Minnesotans Say, \u201cUff da!\u201d | The Loom"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m just back from ScienceOnline 2010<\/a>, a conference unlike anything I’ve been to before. I usually go to conferences where my role is the journalistic fly on the wall, gathering story leads from presentations and hallway chats. Sometimes I go to meetings of fellow science writers, where it’s mostly hard-core job talk (with sporadic wailing and gnashing of teeth). ScienceOnline was a strange merging, where scientists talk about how to blog from a research vessel in the middle of the Pacific and journalists talked about how to teach Hollywood producers about quantum physics.<\/p>\n

It is futile for me to distill all the stuff I learned into a blog post. There’s just too much, from the inspiring to the mundane. For example, for good podcasting sound quality, why not sit in a closet with a towel draped over your head? I’m also spending much of today surfing around to new web sites I heard about. Allow me to give a shout-out to fellow Discover-ite Darlene Cavalier’s newly launched\u00a0Science For Citizens<\/a>. It’s like Amazon.com for all sorts of possibilities for doing cool citizen science (such as studying fireflies<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Fortunately, later this week you can watch just about all the sessions on this YouTube channel<\/a>. In the meantime, some audience members have already started uploading their own recordings. Embedded below is my seven-minute spiel. I was part of a panel on “rebooting science journalism.” Moments before I stood up to dispense my wisdom, I decided that nothing summed up the situation today with science journalism better than duck sex<\/a>. And, as I discovered, ScienceOnline is just the sort of place where the audience gets it.<\/p>\n

[More on Uff da here<\/a>]
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