Mammoth Tales: the blog

I have been thinking for a while about starting another blog. I began to think about this as I read about the advantage of an online presence for promoting a book. My idea was not to create a blog only about the book, but one that was less political, more sciency, and to perhaps limit the smart-assery a bit (but only a bit). Everything I learned at the ScienceOnline2010 conference tells me this is the right way to go. The biggest lesson of the conference, in this respect, was "stop goofing off and get it on line." That said, I'm proud to present Mammoth Tales.

As I just said, Mammoth Tales will be less political and more sciency than archy. It will be less of an all purpose blog than archy. Still

In politics, my editorial policy will be to exclude politics that aren't relevant to the larger theme of the blog. Politics, like religion, can be a distraction from a business' primary purpose. How often do we hear conservatives complain about how a celebrity's off stage liberal politics ruin their enjoyment of that celebrity's performances? How often are non-believers turned off by businesses that advertise the owner's religion? I am very strongly opinionated in my politics. If you hadn't noticed that, go back over archy's with a carefully critical eye. I don't want to unnecessarily annoy my other audiences.

It is not my intention for Mammoth Tales to be all mammoths all the time. I intend to use the site for anything I write that is related to science including science journalism, science education, history of science (and maybe a little plain old history). I plan to do more linking to stories that I find interesting, even if I don't have much to add to the stories. I also plan to us more capital letters in the titles.

For the time being, Mammoth Tales post will probably be not much more than a subset of archy posts. I'll cross post anything from archy that fits the editorial slant of the new blog. I'm thinking about a model in which I give some science news a short post in archy and a longer treatment in Mammoth Tales. We'll see how that works out. I plan to repost many of my old mammoth posts from archy and add updates to a few. I hope that makes it interesting enough that archy readers will want to check out both blogs from time to time and, on occasion, flip back and forth between the two driving up the hit meter on both.

Finally, be patient, the new blog isn't very pretty yet (it is nothing more than an off the shelf Blogger template). I still need to populate the blogroll and make a compelling logo. That comes later. the important thing is to get the site up and running and to put some words on it for you to read. As the old cockroach wrote:

they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

I hope it is.