Check out Rapid Ecology!

Three months and change ago, I wrote a post about how academic blogs have very few voices, and we need public blogs where everybody can have a voice.

And then I got to work. With a crack team of volunteers, most of whom are early career scientists, I’m glad to point you to Rapid Ecology.

If you’d like to write a blog post for ecologists, then this site is for you. You just email your post to the site, and they’ll get it uploaded and published in a jiffy.

Rapid Ecology has only been up for about a week, but there are a bunch of great posts, and they are getting more front-page views than I get here! The Rapid Ecology twitter account is picking up scores of followers each day. A couple ecologists who periodically blog on their own site on occasion have folded up shop, to post on Rapid Ecology. There is no limit to the number of posts that the site can publish, and I’m hoping soon it’ll have several posts per day, making it a place where we can exchange ideas much faster than having to wait for journals to do their thing.

If you’d like to see the site succeed in the long term, please support it by submitting a post. The posts have a bigger readership than the average journal article, but they’re much much simpler to write — and if you strike the right note, you can start a constructive conversation.