Comments on: SciScoop Science News Forum – new owner David Bradley

By:

Thu, 12 May 2005 10:53:40 +0000

Hey! Feel free to post, if our editors feel it necessary they can always polish up your English (I know mine needs it on occasion and I am English!)

By: pythor

pythor — Mon, 04 Apr 2005 05:18:54 +0000

You’re just trying to get out of your promise to make a follow up story to The Making of a Fingerprint or Flower.

OK… just kidding. I’d be seriously sorry to see the site go, and almost as sorry to see rickyjames go. I don’t contribute a lot, mostly because I don’t have the time. I do try to make time to vote on stories in the queue.

Of course, from the comments already here, it’s a moot point. SciScoop will go on. Just wanted to put my two cents in.

By: pgptag

pgptag — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 21:44:34 +0000

I would be sad to see Sciscoop go, and will try to do my best to submit new stories (say, realistically, one or two per week). Just submitted one.

By: rickyjames

rickyjames — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:47:53 +0000

Yeah, turns out that D. suddenly showed up and carried the day. IMHO we could not possibly ask for a more qualified person to take over SciScoop and I am very very pleased. Unfortunately I didn’t make several million dollars on this deal (ha- not even 10 cents!) like when Taco sold Slashdot but those heady days are long gone. I’m giving D. a crash course in everything I know about how to run a Scoop community site – THAT won’t take very long! Then he’ll undoubtedly start easing out of the shadows, and I’ll walk off into the sunset. And we’ll all live happily ever after.

That’s MY hope, anyway.

By: apsmith

apsmith — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 06:16:57 +0000

Not I! Ricky’s included all of us “superusers” in his discussions with potential supporters though, but I think we’ll let him explain what’s up…

By: mtigges

mtigges — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 13:10:24 +0000

I presumed you were the A that R had alluded to. I guess not. Now I’m curious who the mysterious A is.

By: GRLCowan

GRLCowan — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:52:38 +0000

I'll write a story a week.

--- Graham Cowan, former hydrogen fan
boron: how individual mobility gains nuclear cachet

By: rickyjames

rickyjames — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:44:01 +0000

Three story volunteers in three hours…stuff like that touches a Tennessean like me from The Volunteer State.

Tell you what. Six more volunteers at one-story-per-week-for-a-year would make nine volunteers total. Add in my willingness to do 5 stories per week max, that would make a total of 14 per week total. At that point, I’ll reconsider abandoning the site and we’ll just organize and go from there as always. A., you still get dibs on ownership tho if you want it.

Note that to volunteer doesn’t mean you have to wait until a particular assigned day to actually sit down and WRITE your story. You can write it ANYTIME and keep it in the submission queue in “EDIT” status until your day comes up to submit. On that day, it goes into voting. We’ll organize the details later.

To me, posting a total of two stories per day to the RSS feed is a big deal. Once it becomes routine, I believe people will take SciScoop as a true active news source that they know is always going to have new content every single day for them to come and see. With two stories, hopefully at least one will be on a topic they care about. Erratic story posting, or irrelevant story posting, to me are the two biggest dangers about losing a reader’s attention. IMHO.

Anyway, look at this sweet little kid up here on the stage with the big brown puppy dog eyes!!! Who’s next to ease his terrible suffering? How about you???

By: apsmith

apsmith — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 11:22:40 +0000

Hmm, it turns out I’ve averaged about 1 a week the last 2 years here. More than 1 a day some weeks, and some long gaps (recent gap mainly caused by a long vacation in California…)

Anyway, as long as averaging 1 a week is ok, I’ll certainly keep it up. I’m not sure why Ricky insists on us all adding up to about 2/day – on the other hand, we ARE missing a few of the major science stories (did we cover the T-Rex soft-tissue discovery the other day?) so more would make this place a bit more complete…

By: RJR

RJR — Wed, 30 Mar 2005 10:39:09 +0000

The issue is not so much number of members or number of readers or even number of comment posters. The issue is how to spread around the non-trivial burden of continuous ongoing story submissions. See my other “big” post on this subject entitled Upon Reflection…An Update. There is a path that can lead to a happy ending here. I hope we can come together as a (gasp) community to take it.