Lately I’ve had time to catch up on my blog-reading, and I noticed that yet another of my favorite science blogs has moved to scienceblogs.com. The Loom joins The Examining Room of Dr. Charles, Good Math, Bad Math, Pharyngula, and Respectful Insolence as blogs on my frequent-reads list that have made the move.
I can’t help being somewhat annoyed by this. I know certain people will laugh at me, but I don’t use an RSS reader, preferring to visit each blog individually. I’m interested in web design and like to see different looks. Sure, I have strong aesthetic biases, but even the best and least annoying design I come up with gets dull after awhile. I enjoy checking out what other people think looks good. Variety is pleasant. (Granted, certain blogs are so painful to look at that they tempt me to move to RSS, but those are blessedly rare.) So I don’t really like seeing the same look at every science blog I read.
Furthermore, scienceblogs.com loads inexcusably slowly. I suspect a lot of that is due to the bloggers’ habits of including lots of pictures, but I don’t remember the same people’s blogs being so slow when they were on their own sites. And of course all that bandwidth is now being pulled from one site, but if you want to be big, you have to invest in the infrastructure to handle it.
Probably the biggest reason to dislike the consolidation is that when the site does something really stupid like hosting a flash ad that makes tornadoes fly over the text, the annoyance is present on all those blogs!
I don’t blame the bloggers - especially once you get to a certain popularity level, it has to be a huge annoyance to deal with website stuff rather than focusing on your writing, so having that taken care of by somebody else is a great deal. (I have to say, the webmasters at scienceblogs are doing an excellent job at keeping the site up and running; I’ve rarely seen it down.) And it’s obviously an honor to be invited to blog at scienceblogs.
I just wish whoever’s in charge of things over there would increase the visual variety a bit and cut down on whatever is killing load times (presumably, obnoxious ads are prime offenders).