Dec 1, 2009
Twitter, Facebook and Sciencebase
Regular readers will hopefully have spotted I’ve cleaned up the site a little recently and added a couple of new widgets to the Sciencebase sidebar menu just below the About section link to my Research Blogging posts.
The first widget heralds the relaunch of the sciencebase.com Facebook fan page and its adoption of a proper URL – http://www.facebook.com/sciencebase.fans. Become a fan and your mugshot will appear at some point on the site itself, amazing, huh? It also means you can get the sciencebase content more directly while on Facebook and comment etc.
Second new item is the live Twitter feed widget, which will display my latest tweets, obvious really, giving you links to the various headlines as they appear on Sciencebase, SciScoop, Sciencetext, and elsewhere. (Elsewhere is usually my Imaging Storm scientific photo blog with my built-in flickr feed, my soundcloud (mostly me making a noise with a guitar and an effects pedal), and a few other places.
The Sciencebase fan page has grown considerably this week from a dozen or so to well over 300 as of today, thanks for following, hope to bring you some fascinating stuff in the coming months.
As an experiment, I tweeted the link this afternoon when the fan numbers were at 334. The link got about 20 clicks in five minutes or so and half a dozen of those people joined as fans on Facebook in that short time. Worth noting if you’re a blogger considering getting better connected across these different tools.
Interesting work. Not sure what to think TWAR (Chlamydophila pneumoniae) is, of course, nothing to do with the sexually transmitted chlamydia infection (not saying you thought it was just spelling it out for readers). There has been a lot of research over the last few decades hinting at bacteria as the underlying cause of a whole range of health problems and disease. I suspect a lot more work will need to be done to prove it one way or the other. With my tin hat on, I’d just have to hope that the work is not being stifled by the pharma industry (it did it with H. pylori in peptic ulcers, after all) because if it turns out we could treat such diseased with generic antibiotics there’d be no more billion-dollar, blockbusters.
Would you please go to pnas.org and use the search term TWAR and tell me what you think. This pathogen has also been linked to Alzheimer’s by Brian Balin at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine and also to asthma by Marcia Kraft M.D. at Duke University.