Online resources for science writers
What's Tumblr? It's the latest social media must-have, according to this post from Jojo Malig at the Poynter Institute. More than 160 news media organizations are using the image-heavy blogging platform. So are individual journalists. But what is it good for, and how do you get started using it? This “Tumblr for journalists” slideshow from Matthew Keys has plenty of quick tips.
Zhiyong Lu reviews 28 online search tools for PubMed, the database that now contains more than 20 million citations and can overwhelm users with too many results. "Over one-third of PubMed queries result in 100 or more citations," the author says. The article has a companion web form that allows users to find tools with special features, such as relevance ranking of results.
Don't just type a bunch of search terms into Google and leave it at that. Use special operators like "site:" to zero in on exactly what you need, says this guide from 10,000 words. "Using a few carefully crafted phrases and punctuation marks can mean the difference between 10,000,000 hits that are hit-or-miss and 100 hits that are tailored to your actual need." With links to guides for Google and Bing.
Google isn't saying that its latest new feature is aimed at operations like Demand Media and Associated Content, but it certainly could be. The search giant has begun giving users a way to permanently block certain sites from appearing in their search results. It requires a Google account and is already available for the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome browsers, with more planned.
Can long-form journalism be adapted to the web? The Atavist is one such effort, just reviewed in the New York Times: "All the richness of the Web — links to more information, videos, casts of characters — is right there in an app displaying an article, but with a swipe of the finger, the presentation reverts to clean text." More here, here and here.
Ivan Oransky at Embargo Watch has the story of a science-oriented web site, io9.com, that suddenly found itself suspended from embargoed releases on the American Association for the Advancement of Science site, EurekAlert — and how it was finally resolved.
Monday was the fifth birthday of the micro-blogging service that, among other things, has shortened the distance between news and its readers. Here's a collection of essays from the Poynter Institute, plus a The New York Times story and a video of Twitter testimonials from famous people, some splattered with paint.
Science magazine's Science Insider page contains news stories about the triple calamities as well as a section that answers reader questions, such as "Why Are Spent Rods So Deadly?" and "Are Underground Tsunami Shelters a Good Idea?"