Tuesday, November 06, 2007

ScienceBlogs Loses One

ScienceBlogs' founding member of the "don't hate the religious" clique, has moved on from blogging and resigned his position as ScienceBlogger. Rob Knopp has never been careful with his words; he writes what he thinks and makes no excuses for it. Evidently, the ScienceBorg (who are very good at generating conversations about science, and I applaud them for it) is not interested in assimilating his posts into their archive now that he has left. This is a shame, since some of his posts shed new light on my own position as a scientist and a Christian. My guess is that Seed (they are the folks who manage ScienceBlogs) wants to extinguish any evidence that scientists and science bloggers can consider religion an important part of life.

Thanks Rob. You will be missed. I hope to see you around someday.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey -- thanks for the sentiment.

Re: Seed and Scienceblogs, they have been nothing but supportive. The reason for not keeping the archive has nothing to do with me in particular. If I were still blogging, every indication is that they would love to keep me around. Honestly, I have no idea what the official position on science and religion of the Seed overlords is. We all know PZ's position. But, there are others there who are Christians. I won't "out" anybody, but I know that at least one or two of the other current sciencebloggers even teach Sunday School.

It's just a matter of server space, maintenance effort, etc. Once I'm no longer contributing to scienceblogs.com, it really is a lot to ask them to maintain my archives indefinitely. This is sort of an odd issue in the Web era, when archives are no longer things that are gathered in library halls, but are things just as active as current pages. However, I fully understand what they're doing, and if I were the sysop there, I'd probably do the same thing.

-Rob Knop

thomas robey said...

Thanks for that clarification, Rob. ScienceBlogs is getting so big that I have trouble keeping track of everyone. That leaves me sticking to my old tried and true favorites.

Anonymous said...

Here's a vote for you to fill Rob's void. I'd love to see you on Scienceblogs. Probably pays a bit better than $105 every seven months, I'd imagine!

Drugmonkey said...

it IS sad though. Lot's of Rob's stuff can really stand the test of time. it would be a shame for it not to be available. shouldn't the interest of an advertising type site be more on what generates activity rather than how currently fresh it is? Maybe archive a "greatest hits" or something would be the thing?