As some of you will already be aware, SciScoop's rickyjames stepped down from SciScoop and passed control to me, freelance science writer David Bradley. I'd first like to thank Ricky and his colleagues for creating such a fantastic site and community over the last few years. I hope I can build on their legacy; with your continued support, I'm confident that will be possible.

A little bit about me - David Bradley is a freelance science journalist with more than fifteen years experience in writing, editing, and journalism. I've written for countless science magazines (New Scientist, Nature, Science, Popular Science, American Scientist etc), numerous papers, dozens of webzines, and various organizations from the National Academy of Sciences to Argonne National Laboratory.

I am now formulating plans for the future of SciScoop, please rest assured the site is not going to disappear, nor is it going to change so radically that you won't recognise it, but do chip in with ideas if you feel there is an important feature you'd like to see added, or a not so important one you'd like to spike. I've already made a few minor tweaks to the site, which I hope will boost visitor numbers from the search engines and so help us build up the membership. If you run a website yourself you could help my efforts in this regard by adding a link to SciScoop, preferably using the phrase "SciScoop - Science News Forum" as the anchor text; if you're linking to the old address SciFiToday.com then please update your link. Alternatively, you might like to render the SciScoop RSS newsfeed on your site (please email me for more info on how to do that if you're not sure) or check out this howto article; it's best if you don't use the javascript approach as that's not read by the search engines.

SciScoop is one of the best implementations I've seen of what Tim Berners-Lee originally had in mind when he invented the Web (a community-driven resource that is read and edited by its members, Wiki resources are a good example of that too). And, that's down to the growing SciScoop user community. I hope those of you who have contributed to SciScoop in the past will continue to do so, maybe even increase your submission frequency, helping us to build the community into one of the strongest science writing sites on the net. I also hope new users and long-time lurkers might feel inspired to contribute an article or two in the coming weeks and months. I'm really looking forward to growing SciScoop, I hope you'll join in the fun!

David Bradley
Sciencebase