Month: January 2005

CERN’s Sir Tim Berners-Lee, father of the world wide web, has been honoured again, this time being named Greatest Briton 2004. Definitely a worthy recipient of the 25,000 pounds prize!

But, look at what his hyperlinking idea spawned: a more than a decade-long information revolution from Amazon to the Zoological Department of the University of Zanzibar. Interestingly, TBL never envisaged the Web evolving in the way it did. His original concept was more akin to the interactive blogs and wikis that have sprung up in that last couple of years, where visitors to a page can contribute to and edit pages and add links to other pertinent pages. I’m sure he would have kept the whole thing to himself if he could have foreseen the dot.com hype and the bursting stockmarket bubble of the 1990s.

But, where would we be without his little webby baby? Probably getting a lot more fresh air and exercise, I’d say.

Sciencebase has been around a long time, fifteen years as of this July 2014 update. Before that, it had a pre-incarnation in the form of my Elemental Discoveries web pages that I first published on the web in late 1995! It’s changed and evolved.

There was a time before blogs, when Sciencebase was essentially a blog, it’s been a portal, a hub, a webzine etc. It even used to have a links directory stuffed with useful science links back in the late 1990s early 2000s. But things move on, people no longer need blogrolls, they want links to specific content on an ad hoc basis, which is where Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram etc all come into their own.

Moreover, I have so many sources that it would be impossible to keep the lists up to date. If you want to find out which sites I read and respect then read my blogs posts, follow me on Twitter and like the Sciencebase Facebook page, that way you will keep abreast of the things that I am keeping abreast of…as it were.

UPDATE: The original post was January 2005 and the November mentioned was obviously November 2004, it’s May 2016 as I type this update, not seen the black variant in our garden since this photo was taken.

Nothing is black and white, or should that be grey and black? As I type, I can see two grey squirrels chasing around our back garden, doing the kinds of things squirrels usually do. But, there’s no sign of the slightly fluffier black squirrel we’ve been seeing around these parts since last November.

I’m not worried for Cyril (obvious name, really) but curious as to how the ecological dynamic is being disturbed by the grey incomers. Ironic really, given that the black is a simple genetic variant of the American grey and neither are native to the UK. We have our own red squirrel, which is increasingly rare even in Northumberland (I did see one in France last year though).

TL:DR –  I have been freelancing as a science writer since the early 1990s. Here are some pointers for anyone considering freelancing in this field.

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Ever wondered what scientific journalists do? Well, there are some useful FAQs on the web, in particular at the CASW, NASW, WFSJ, and ABSW sites that do a pretty good job of explaining although from my personal perspective there is no definitive job description.

As you know, David Bradley writes for numerous websites providing news, views and interviews, but he also does a spot of web doodling, web editing, photography and image manipulation. He has written numerous information brochures, reports on scientific meetings for several outlets, contributed anecdotes and pithy observations to Feedback in New Scientist and other markets. He has also written and contributed to several books, done radio interviews, consulted for TV and radio, newsletters, journals (I’ve sub-edited a fair few of those too!) and websites, and that’s on top of pounding the scientific journalism beat for countless (well, not quite) magazines and papers from The Guardian and Daily Telegraph to Nature, PNAS and Science. He produces several RSS newsfeeds for his own work and that of several clients. He has even written a few letters to magazines, although admittedly that’s not quite as challenging as helping to create a science news webzine! Is that enough bragging?

Anyway, if you want to know more about science writers, science journalists, scientific journalists, journalistic scientists or whatever then Wikipedia has a nice entry on the subject. This is an earlier rendition: “A science writer is more than a scientific journalist although similarly, a science writer specializes in writing about science topics. He or she may do this for many audiences outside the realm of the traditional journalist’s beat. For instance, books, essays, feature articles, brochures, in-house magazines, press releases, promotional literature and other materials like websites and intranets. A science writer, like a scientific journalist must be competent not only in stringing words together to create interesting sentences but must also be able to understand scientific issues and research to such a degree that important results can be interpreted for the particular audience in question. This may entail simplifying or equally expanding on a given scientific topic.” For an alt view of web design check out this company.

David Bradley is a member of the US National Association of Science Writers, the Association of British Science Writers, which in turn, is a member of EUSJA (the European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations. He is a writer specializing in chemistry and other sciences.