Back in November 2002, I got an email from a guy named Drog who asked me if I’d like to write a story for his new Scoop website Sci-Fi Today.  I said sure.  A little over two years and 1100+ stories later, the website is now mine and has been renamed SciScoop.  Hundreds of people now come here daily to find a couple of science stories with some interesting new links to click.  In today’s Internet environment, that counts as a modest success story.

Yet I had hoped for more.  The two icons of what I wanted SciScoop to become were of course Slashdot and kuro5hin.  The main features the two sites have which SciScoop does not is a vibrant sense of community, where a wide variety of people make quality submissions, both original articles and comment postings.  Instead, SciScoop is now pretty much about What Two Press Releases Will Rickyjames Post Today.

Look, it’s really easy.  You go to Eurekalert or Science Daily and click on a couple of interesting story titles.  Because these are press release sites, you can use the material verbatim; just copy all that juicy text you see into the SciScoop submit story box.  Split it so the first three or four paragraphs are in the top box and the rest is in the bottom one, “below the fold”.  Then add a sentence at the end of the bottom box that says, “Text for this article comes from an XYZ press release” and link those last four words to the page from you copied the text.  Go back up to the top box, copy a few key phrases into Google to find some interesting supporting web pages, and add a few additional links to top box keywords.  Voila, instant SciScoop story.