Romance of the Scienceblog

If you guys haven't been keeping up, or if you're not scienceblog follower then let me summarize the fallowing to you: It's the fucking Three Kingdoms over there except with out the three kingdoms. Okay more like the disintegration of the Easter Han in general. When Zimmer and Yong left to Discoverblog, it's like the individual territories that ceded themselves to outside forces. We can consider the intrusion of Pepsi to be like the Yellow Turban rebellion, weakening the power of SB. The railing of this intrusion is like the campaign against the Yellow Turbans. Finally after SB quails the Pepsi incident, like the Han, the individual bloggers begin to make their own way and break away from SB. Superbug, Zuska, Speakeasy Science, PalMD, Grrlscientist, Laelaps, and Bora are some of such bloggers that chose to break away from the seemingly inept SEED media. PZ and Laden are in strike. A number of other scientist like Orac are considering their resignation as well. Yet like the Han, there are a few bloggers, like Brayton, Tetrapod, and Klemetti, are still there and functional. But like the last Han Emperor, SB has been unable (or perhaps unwilling) to fix the situation.

Well, at least the fallout isn't because they were caught sockpuppeting. That event was just aggravating. At the same time though it was unexpected. SB's fallout was a storm we could see coming. Complaints about the ads, the paycheck, and the commenting system had been there for awhile. Pepsi just broke the back of the all the bloggers there.

The consequence of this is quite clear: A great lost of readership. People like to read stable blogs and not have to change so abruptly. For PZ, I know already that his announced strike has caused a great deal of his readership to move on.

So what's left today? In the end of the day a blogger does whatever he or she wants regardless of the readership. I blog but still have virtually no one reading it. PZ could equally do the same and yet some how he'll have followers. Blogging isn't as simple as finding a domain in which to host it. If the conditions is wrong, no matter how much a blogger wants to write, they will refrain from doing so.