Many science bloggers are asking why Blogger.com deleted a science blog, ERV (endogenous retrovirus). The blogger, Abbie Smith, is a graduate student in HIV research. She has shown herself quite capable of debating pesudoscience floggers such as Michael Behe, pointing out their mistakes and lies, demanding proof of their claims, and tapping her foot while they come up empty. For this Behe calls her “some woman” (not HIV researcher, not grad student, not young scientist) who’s a Mean Girl.
And then a couple of days ago her blog suddenly disappeared from Blogger. It isn’t full of links. It’s not spam. So what happened? Did some creationists complain about her? Did Blogger yank the plug without investigating? Inquiring minds want to know, but there doesn’t seem to be any place to ask that question.
ERV is back on blogger for now with no explanation offered as to the breach of service. ERV is pulling up stakes and transferring her articles to Scienceblogs.com, where there’s a committment to actually supporting science bloggers. Scienceblogs hosts the most popular science blog in the world, Pharyngula, and I expect the site to attract much more traffic for ERV.
Blogger’s treatment of ERV has made me think that I’d better accelerate the transfer of my blog to WordPress, especially since Blogger’s kludgy published procedure for backing up a blog backs up only the last 500 posts.
Wednesday, 30 April 2008 21:13 at 21:13
Thanks for the support, Monado
Blogger hasnt told me anything. Mark (’Good Math, Bad Math blog) went out on a limb for me and single handedly saved Blogger ERV.
I know I smell a rat, but there is nothing I can do about it…
Saturday, 10 May 2008 15:06 at 15:06
[...] 2008 May 10, Saturday, 15:06 — monado A couple of weeks ago, Blogger deleted ERV’s blog, without warning and for no apparent reason, deep-sixing her Google stats in the proces. Now, she’s back at the top of the search [...]