There’s a group blog for battling creationists (The Panda’s Thumb), a group blog for fighting the climate change denialists (RealClimate), and now there’s one targeting quacks: Science Based Medicine. Add it to your bookmarks and newsfeeds!

Jon Swift asked for various blogs to submit a “best of” post for his end-of-year list, and it’s a clever way to get an idea of a blog’s content and introduce yourself to some interesting blogs. My entry is a science post, but even that one consigns me to an eternity in hell.

Those canny publicizers at Seed have come up with a ScienceBlogs Latest Posts Widget — if you’ve got a blog, you can put this bit of code on it and advertise Scienceblogs for us!

I already mentioned that I’m not a big fan of traffic rankings for blogs, but despite the focus on traffic numbers, this is at least a subjectively filtered list of popular liberal/progressive blogs. The ranking isn’t as interesting as the fact that it’s a good list of politically copacetic blogs.

I also see that all I have to do is increase my traffic 10 or 20 fold to catch up with Daily Kos!

So go give them to her. Little Miss Shelley is almost out of the larval stage, and is well over half my age now.

P.S. I hope Karmen is bringing cookies to the party.

There’s this new service, Wikio, that is trying to rank various blogs. It’s very pretty, but I have to say that ranking is entirely the wrong approach — it simply perpetuates a falsely hierarchical view of the web and acts as a positive feedback system to reinforce popularity; blogs are promoted as popular because they are popular, making them more popular. It’s nerds with computers realizing that gosh, traffic and links are easy to measure, so let’s provide a pigeonholing service that sorts by the simplest, most basic tool we can invent.

This one at least tries to add a qualitative estimate of content by grouping the blogs into categories, like “science” and “sports” and “health”, but too often these are arbitrary and irrelevant, and rife with omissions. The blog listed just below mine is a car blog, for instance; Sandwalk is left out, and Wilkins is included. None of these are bad blogs, but I think it does no one a service to be jumbled up and stacked according to a number that is a sloppy proxy for the quality of the content.

You know what I’ve come to like? Tag clouds. At a glance, you can tell quickly what subjects have come to the fore on a blog that uses them, and you can spot blogs that might address subjects of interest. As for whether it is a good blog on those subjects, I determine that by actually reading a few entries.

Everyone should congratulate the Scientific Indian and spouse on the birth of their daughter — and on their excellent taste in names!

The 2007 Medical Weblog Awards are accepting nominations — and they’re giving out prizes to the winners this year. Get over there and tell ’em who your favorites are.

I guess the science bloggers won’t be getting Time’s Blog of the Year Award then (which is nice, considering that other Minnesota blog that won, once upon a time.)

I’m fibbing, anyway. Michael Lemonick doesn’t really hate us, I think he was just trying to get a rise out of us. Success!

Our puissant overlords are considering further directions in which to expand after their opening of ScienceBlogs.de, so now they’re running a poll: let them know what languages you know and what language the next Sb should be in. They appreciate your input. It simplifies the assimilation.