Having reflected upon the survey I did for the site, earlier in the year, I have a few plans as to ‘what to do in 
2009′.
Some of the things you might have noticed is that I try to make an effort to promote other sites and projects, as well as making a firm effort to connect with new audiences and work more offline and in ‘the real world’ (yes, there is such a place)!
One such example is my article over at a great Australian site called Your Kids Education:
If you’re a parent seeking to educate, enrich, and inspire your children, you have come to the right place - whether you are looking for information on formal education, activities for your children, or educational products and services. We hope you enjoy exploring YourKidsEd!
For that site, I submitted this holiday-heading-towards-school-time article called “Books Teens Read (Which You Should Read Too!)“. It’s rather akin to the issue I wrote about last year about literacy starting at home and modeling being a great way for parents to know and relate to children’s reading habits. Consider it part of the ‘getting out of the Skeptical Zone’!
What I should also plug are ongoing Blog Carnivals – those of you interested in entering in for the academic-life Praxis Carnival, out on the 15th January here at Podblack.com – then you’ll be wanting some details:
The carnival is intended to cover all aspects of life as an academic, whether it’s the lifestyle, career progress, doing a Ph.D., getting funding, climbing the slippery pole, academic life as a minority, working with colleagues and students, dealing with the peer-review process, publishing, grants, science 2.0, amusing anecdotes, conference experiences, philosophical musings, public engagement, or even historical articles about what life was like in the good (or bad) old days.
Last edition was out at Effortless Incitement and the first was at A Blog Around the Clock – check them out and the ones in between to see the standard! My email address is in the ‘About’ link at the top of the page (in short, it’s podblack at gmail).
Now that’s out of the way, what else is up:
- My dissertation will be taking center stage for a while, so that will mean for the first few months of 2009, I’ll be working on that. I’ll work around popping up blog posts about progress, but I hope you won’t mind too much if I’m a little irregular. I can always cut-and-paste what my work for the day was like!
- I have a handful of Skeptic Zone podcast interviews lined up to complete too; if you’d like to suggest more topics, you can head to our rather snappy site or even the Skeptic Zone blog or even join us on the Facebook page for the Skeptic Zone!
- I’ll be writing and submitting articles for publication, I hope – there’ll be a few people out there getting material over the next month or so.
- Part of my ‘networking’ efforts include writing for the Young Australian Skeptics and Everyday Skeptics and contributing to Stop Jenny McCarthy (aka stopjenny.com). Hope you’re checking them out too!
I guess my question to you is: what things do you think I should be regularly doing with the site this year? I will be looking over the survey I did with this site last year and taking on board what was popular then – you may note, I’m already starting to work more on posting about superstitions and will make the a regular thing if people like it.
Other than that – feel free to pop in some suggestions. And whilst you’re doing that – have a look at the wonderful sites that were nominated for 2008 Weblog Awards!
They include the very wonderful Australian site Hoyden About Town (vote, vote, vote!) and some great science blogs like Pharyngula (PZ Myers) and Respectful Insolence and Autism Vox (vote, vote, vote!) and some great people like Wil Wheaton, Pandagon, Neil Gaiman’s Journal and the ever-loved cartoon xkcd for ‘Comic Strip’ and io9 for ‘Culture Blog’. Vote!
You must log in to post a comment.