Scientific American launches a community site

Here’s something to get excited about. Scientific American has launched a community wing to their website. Members can now discuss things in various fora and also blog on science stories. It’s potentially a major coup for SciAm, but not quite yet for reasons I explain on a test blog at I set up at the SciAm site. I think that’s only a temporary drawback and I’d expect them to fix it soon.

I think that’s likely because SciAm have a positive attitude when it comes to the internet. I subscribe to the digital edition, and I’ll review that some time in the future, but with flexible downloads and no DRM it’s a subscription model that works, at least for me. It also seems they’re also working out how to use some of their other content to make a buzz. Their videos have an embed code, which sadly doesn’t seem to work yet. They have short adverts tagged onto the start, but I won’t begrudge them that if it gives bloggers visual material to support what they’re talking about. When you start trying to work out reproduction rights things get messy, so it might be that some SciAm based material will only work in the SciAm blogs. Even so that would be a step forward in creating discussion around the magazine. It’s definitely worth keeping an eye on the site in the New Year.