by Roberto
The short answer to that question is an enthusiastic YES! Of course, there is a future for STC, and I think it is bright. The long answer, well... that's what this post is all about. It requires that I give you the background story first. It reveals some of the inner workings of STC, I hope you won't mind my telling it.
Towards the end of each year, I usually have some sort of existential crisis regarding the future of my involvement with the blog. Last year was no exception. In late October I asked Christoph, Janie and Mechas to "think long and hard about the future of blogging in general and STC in particular... Where do we see it going?"
What ensued was a very healthy discussion around questions such as: Why do we write for STC? Who do we want to reach with our writing? What is the purpose of our blog? While I went into the conversation with a fair amount of uncertainty, I came out convinced that we write for STC because we very much enjoy doing it. In fact, we love it; it's our way of learning and remembering. And, of course, we write for you our readers. You, above all, will keep us posting.
I admit that I would love for more people to read what we post. STC is now 18 years old, an amazing age for a blog given that blogging as a form of communication only got started some twenty-five years ago. But the world of communication has evolved at lightning speed in that short time. As more and more means of competing for your attention become available, you are less and less likely to spend the few minutes that it takes to read one of our posts. So, it is not surprising that our pageviews have steadily decreased over the years. Despite all of that, I still get goosebumps whenever someone tells me in person or in writing something like: "I really enjoyed your last post" or "I'm a longtime fan of STC." Because there are still some of you out there and because we love writing, we'll keep at it.
Why was I uncertain about the future of STC? There is no doubt that the speed at which "generative artificial intelligence" has evolved affected me. The tools that exist today for analyzing scientific papers are mindboggling. Witness for example paperQA2 from the non-profit Future House. And those are just early efforts. Where will we be by the end of the year? Not to mention in another 18 years? In my mind, the STC of the future should not even try to compete with those means of synthesis.
What led me to regain my enthusiasm for STC? The ideas that emerged from our discussion. As a group we reached a consensus; we want STC to evolve towards writing that results from our own freeform thinking, writing that emerges from the freedom to shape our messy thinking into more creative pieces. For this to be possible, we want to operate under less time pressure. Yet, we feel that part of STC's success is its consistency; we have always posted twice weekly, without fail.
As our reader, you should expect to see changes in STC during 2025. The first change you will see will be in our Thursday posts. We have a plethora of wonderful topics to bring to your attention and we don't want most of those to go by the wayside. These we will now share in a new category we are calling "Noteworthy." Whenever we discover an item, new or old, that we consider worthy of notice, we'll write a brief description and provide a link to the full version. By our choice, we'll only be targeting open access items.
Our Noteworthy postings will accomplish two aims: bring interesting topics to your attention and provide us with extra time to develop more creative pieces to post on Mondays. While doubtless we still will produce some paper-focused posts in very much our "old STC style," be prepared for some surprises. We hope you'll enjoy the way STC will change; we are certainly excited about these new experiments.
Do you want to comment on this post? We would be delighted to hear from you! Please send us an email, or comment on Mastodon or Bluesky. Feel free to subscribe if you'd like to receive regular email notifications about new blog posts.
Comments Arriving We greatly appreciate your comments and we'll be posting selected threads (sometimes lightly edited for brevity). As you will see, this is in part prompted by the first comment we received after this post appeared.
From Rodney: While I have been a reader for many years, I found the change a year or so ago, from making a comment below the article to needing yet another login on another site in order to do so frustrating to the point of being disappointed and even unwilling to contribute in my own opinion. Please try and change so that the reader does not need yet another login to be an addition to the topic.
Roberto: Hi Rodney – I completely agree with you; I've never loved the removal of the comments that we enacted a couple of years ago there was a reason. The former commenting platform (Disqus) fell apart and stopped notifying us of new comments. It became untenable because many comments were trolls or bots that we no longer could easily monitor. Here's my suggestionand I would love to have your feedback. What do would you think if, with a reasonably short turnaround time, we were post to post comments we receive via email or social media at the bottom of the blog entry, with a response when appropriate. Thanks again for reading STC, we very much appreciate it!
Rodney: YES to the excellent solution you propose. As a retiree from a small university, STC is a wonderful opportunity to consider and explore the varied topics under the umbrella of our fields. Thank you for your efforts on STC's behalf
From Fernando: An important aspect is if a blog comment can be quoted in an academic publication. According to the "Research Integrity" rules of Cambridge University, YES (see here). Are bloggers aware of this?
Roberto: Fernando, you raise an excellent point and one that STC readers should be made aware of. Aside from perhaps writing a full post on the pros and cons of citing from blogs, I'm immediately posting your comment with the link included to inform our readers.
From Gosse: Dear Roberto and others, As a retired microbiology professor I have been reading your posts for many, many years. And I used quite some material in it for my classes. Just keep on going with STC posts, microbiology stays too interesting to stop. Then I will keep reading them.
Roberto: Dear Gosse, your words are wonderful feedback. It is particularly nice to have people like you who have followed STC for a long time. We'll keep at it!
From naturepoker: I admit my heart skipped a bit just reading the title of the post. Generative content could never replace the human history and concern behind these posts. As a long time on-again-off-again reader I'm eagerly looking forward to new articles and categories.
Christoph: Thank you!
From Emily Stowe: STC is an amazing resource for teaching! I often send my undergrads to read it and have developed an assignment for them to write something for STC.
Christoph: Thank you and yes, do encourage your students to write something for STC. Actually, Elio had started this for seminars he gave, and we have numerous posts by students in our archive.
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