Science in the Triangle

This Thursday and Friday I attended the Block By Block conference in Chicago, a meeting about local and niche online journalism.

The conference was organized by Michele McLellan (Twitter), a Reynolds Fellow, and Jay Rosen (Twitter), professor of journalism at NYU.

For various reasons (mostly personal and financial) I had to miss a number of interesting conferences this year, from Lindau Nobel meeting, through Open Summit in Berkeley, to Science Online London, but this meeting was worth the scramble and a tight-budget travel. Out of 120 participants, the only one I have met before in real life was Jay Rosen. But I knew a number of others from their online work - on Twitter, their blogs, their news-sites and in case of Scott Rosenberg (Twitter) also his excellent book which I keep recommending to everyone who is interested in blogs.

The first thing I did when I arrived was edit my name-tag. I crossed off “PLoS” and in its place wrote in big black letters ScienceInTheTriangle.com - the local, niche news-site we have been developing over the past three years or so. What we are doing with the site and our experiences with developing it were topics of interest for many of the people I met and talked to at the conference.
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