An award and some announcements

ByEd Yong
March 10, 2009
2 min read

We won an award

Some of you may know that I write for another blog – Cancer Research UK’s Science Update blog – as part of my day job. There, I write about new cancer research together with my colleagues Kat and Henry. Tonight, we won a Science Communication award from the Association of Medical Research Charities (AMRC) for our work on the blog, in the category of Online Research.

Blogging for an organisation is a very different ball-game to this – you have to still be readable and engaging while exercising a certain amount of restraint in order to maintain the charity’s reputation and tone of voice. Still, it’s a very rewarding experience and the judges tonight praised the blog’s chatty tone, excellent writing, direct engagement with supporters, and in particular, its myth-busting headline-correcting posts. We’re all really proud. 

I rote for teh Grauniad

In other news, a couple of weeks ago, I was approached by the Guardian about the post I wrote on suicide attacks and religion. Andrew Brown, who edits the Belief section of the Comment is Free site liked the piece and asked me to respin it for the Guardian. It’s a great case-study of the mainstream media taking the blogosphere more seriously. I’ve seen few examples in the past of a blog post being converted into a piece for the MSM. Hopefully, it won’t be the last.

It may also interest readers here to compare the comments in the original post and the Guardian one. Quite frankly, this blog’s readers (that’ll you fine people) more clearly understood the study and and were generally better at keeping the discussion on topic. You all rock.

Buy OpenLab

And finally, OpenLab 2008 is finally available for sale! Jenny Rohn did a wonderful job in editing it and Dave Ng and Glendon Mellow have designed by far the most attractive cover yet. A worthwhile purchase for your bookshelf and if it’s any extra incentive, there’s a piece from this blog in it.

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