By Hamish Johnston
When the Physics World editorial team started blogging in earnest early in 2008, it was our first chance to interact much more directly and informally with the physics community – prior to that we had been mainly restricted to conventional news stories and features. Since then, of course, the social-media world has grown out of all recognition and Physics World is now on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google+ and YouTube, with these sites giving us new ways of communicating with you (and vice versa).
But we think the Physics World blog still has a big role to play in what we do and today marks a major upgrade to it. While most of the improvements are behind the scenes, I thought I’d mention a few new features we hope you’ll enjoy.
Each Physics World blogger now has their own profile page (here’s mine) with a brief biography and photograph – in case you are wondering what your favourite blogger looks like! The profiles also include each blogger’s particular interests – which could be useful if you want to contact us about a specific topic – and link to a list of all the posts written by that blogger.
We’ve also made it easier for you to explore the blog in terms of the most popular subjects that we cover – just click on any of the items in the “Popular tags” panel at the left-hand side of the page and you’ll be taken to a list of blog posts related to that topic.
From our point of view, it’s now much easier to include multimedia clips within blogs, so you can look forward to many more of these in the future. For a flavour of what’s to come, here is an audio clip of physics blogger Mark Trodden of the University of Pennsylvania telling us why he blogs.
The revamp is all well and good, but do you think blogging still has a part to play in the 2013 social-media world? Or is it being eclipsed by other, more concise, faster forms of social-media communication? Tell us what you think by commenting below.
