Month: October 2006

Notes from the National Association of Science Writers conference

If you missed the National Association of Science Writers‘ conference in Baltimore last weekend, you can read about many of the sessions on a conference blog of sorts. Lots of well written posts there. (Personal favorite: Adventures in Alternative Science Communication, which described a session on why talking about science need not be stodgy.) But what else should we expect from a writers conference?

You can also read the views of UMR staffer Lance Feyh, who posted about killer wasps, zombie cockroaches and other things he learned about at the conference on our science blog, Visions.

Are MySpace’s best days behind it?

If you’re thinking about creating a MySpace presence for your university, you may want to think twice. Sunday’s Washington Post reported that MySpace’s biggest user group, teens, seem to be losing interest. Some are spending less time on the site; others are deleting their profiles altogether.

Says one high schooler: “I think it’s definitely going down — a lot of my friends have deleted their MySpaces and are more into Facebook now.”

Adds a classmate: “I’ve grown out of it.”

Concludes the Post: “Such is the social life of teens on the Internet: Powerful but fickle.”

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus bloggers note that “adolescent caprice may actually be less of a problem for MySpace than technology’s forward march: More attractive, less public sites like Facebook are are cutting into the social network’s market share.”

Which leads to the question: When will Facebook peak?