Cosmic Variance

Welcome back from the weekend everyone. This week is off to a promising start with two stories on SLAC Today. One is a short piece about a Summer Undergraduate Laboratory Internship (SULI) intern, who won an award for the summer. It's my third piece that has SULI mentioned in it, so you can see how large of an event it is. The second piece is about an ATLAS workshop occurring this week at SLAC. ATLAS is one of the experiments taking place at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

Last Friday I had the pleasure of interviewing JoAnne Hewett and Risa Wechsler who are fellow bloggers. The only difference between me and them is that they have Ph.D.'s and people actually read their blog. The, with five other scientists, contribute regularly to www.CosmicVariance.com. The website was recently reported to be the 4th most visited blog about science and the most about the physical sciences by Science magazine. They have about 4,000 readers every day.

So what makes their website so successful?

I think a lot of it has to do with time. They've been doing it for over two years, and the two guys who started the site had been blogging for over a year before that. Eventually they gathered readers, and brought them all together into one place.

Secondly, it helps that they really know what they're talking about. They are experts in their fields and are constantly on the cuff of cutting edge research.

And finally, they must be very good writers, because just because you know about a topic doesn't mean you can communicate it clearly to others. And they obviously succeed at doing this, or they wouldn't have grown over the past few years.

So what do I think makes a good blog?

Time, talent, patience, knowledge, a good topic, and people spreading the word…