One of the side effects of these exciting times for science policy in Washington is that we don’t get as much time to blog as we need to. Even as late as two years ago, the drumbeat for competitiveness and innovation — the driving themes behind most of the science policy developments over the last year — was significantly softer than it is now…almost inaudible, in fact. That gave us plenty of time to devote to lengthy coverage of just about every development in the space — every news article, every press conference, every mention by a key (or not so key) policymaker.
Well, over the last two years, the pace of developments has quickened dramatically. Nearly every day there’s some mention of innovation policy, or the importance of IT research, or the need to ramp up the federal commitment to the “physical sciences” somewhere. Our queue of potential topics for blog posts has grown considerably. Unfortunately, because we’re also out in the trenches working these developments, we don’t often get the time we need to really delve into the topics as we usually do with our posts.
Rather than let those topics grow stale in a queue that isn’t moving any faster than it ever has, we’ve decided to go a little “Web 2.0” and start a Computing Research Policy TumbleLog, on which we can post quick links to articles we find noteworthy, or quotes that resonate, or events with think are interesting. There won’t be much (or even any) analysis of the topics on the TumbleLog, just pointers to the original sources. All the meaty stuff — the analysis, the details — will still be here, with a frequency that’s hopefully unchanged.
So, you might want to bookmark the Computing Research Policy TumbleLog if you’re interested in some of the things we’ve found interesting to note, but keep an eye here for our usual content as well.
I’ve also attempted to set up a little widget over there on the left sidebar that shows the most recent topics on the tumblelog, but it doesn’t seem to work very well in Safari on my Mac. So if anyone has a suggestion for a better approach, please let me know! This Web 2.0 stuff is tricky. 🙂 Fixed, I think!