Is there a fu­ture for STC?

by Roberto

The short an­swer to that ques­tion is an en­thu­si­as­tic YES! Of course, there is a fu­ture for STC, and I think it is bright. The long an­swer, well... that's what this post is all about. It re­quires that I give you the back­ground story first. It re­veals some of the in­ner work­ings of STC, I hope you won't mind my telling it.

To­wards the end of each year, I usu­ally have some sort of ex­is­ten­tial cri­sis re­gard­ing the fu­ture of my in­volve­ment with the blog. Last year was no ex­cep­tion. In late Oc­to­ber I asked Christoph, Janie and Me­chas to "think long and hard about the fu­ture of blog­ging in gen­eral and STC in par­tic­u­lar... Where do we see it go­ing?"

Photo Credit: Me­chas Zam­brano

What en­sued was a very healthy dis­cus­sion around ques­tions such as: Why do we write for STC? Who do we want to reach with our writ­ing? What is the pur­pose of our blog? While I went into the con­ver­sa­tion with a fair amount of un­cer­tainty, I came out con­vinced that we write for STC be­cause we very much en­joy do­ing it. In fact, we love it; it's our way of learn­ing and re­mem­ber­ing. And, of course, we write for you our read­ers. You, above all, will keep us post­ing.

I ad­mit that I would love for more peo­ple to read what we post. STC is now 18 years old, an amaz­ing age for a blog given that blog­ging as a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion only got started some twenty-five years ago. But the world of com­mu­ni­ca­tion has evolved at light­ning speed in that short time. As more and more means of com­pet­ing for your at­ten­tion be­come avail­able, you are less and less likely to spend the few min­utes that it takes to read one of our posts. So, it is not sur­pris­ing that our pageviews have steadily de­creased over the years. De­spite all of that, I still get goose­bumps when­ever some­one tells me in per­son or in writ­ing some­thing like: "I re­ally en­joyed your last post" or "I'm a long­time fan of STC."  Be­cause there are still some of you out there and be­cause we love writ­ing, we'll keep at it.

Why was I un­cer­tain about the fu­ture of STC? There is no doubt that the speed at which "gen­er­a­tive ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence" has evolved af­fected me. The tools that ex­ist to­day for an­a­lyz­ing sci­en­tific pa­pers are mind­bog­gling. Wit­ness for ex­am­ple paperQA2 from the non-profit Fu­ture House. And those are just early ef­forts. Where will we be by the end of the year? Not to men­tion in an­other 18 years? In my mind, the STC of the fu­ture should not even try to com­pete with those means of syn­the­sis.

As our reader, you should ex­pect to see changes in STC dur­ing 2025. The first change you will see will be in our Thurs­day posts. We have a plethora of won­der­ful top­ics to bring to your at­ten­tion and we don't want most of those to go by the way­side. These we will now share in a new cat­e­gory we are call­ing "Note­wor­thy." When­ever we dis­cover an item, new or old, that we con­sider wor­thy of no­tice, we'll write a brief de­scrip­tion and pro­vide a link to the full ver­sion. By our choice, we'll only be tar­get­ing open ac­cess items.

Our Note­wor­thy post­ings will ac­com­plish two aims: bring in­ter­est­ing top­ics to your at­ten­tion and pro­vide us with ex­tra time to de­velop more cre­ative pieces to post on Mon­days. While doubt­less we still will pro­duce some pa­per-fo­cused posts in very much our "old STC style," be pre­pared for some sur­prises. We hope you'll en­joy the way STC will change; we are cer­tainly ex­cited about these new ex­per­i­ments.

 

Do you want to com­ment on this post? We would be de­lighted to hear from you! Please send us an email, or com­ment on Mastodon or Bluesky. Feel free to sub­scribe if you'd like to re­ceive reg­u­lar email no­ti­fi­ca­tions about new blog posts.

 

Com­ments Ar­riv­ing We greatly ap­pre­ci­ate your com­ments and we'll be post­ing se­lected threads (some­times lightly edited for brevity). As you will see, this is in part prompted by the first com­ment we re­ceived af­ter this post ap­peared.

 

From Rod­ney: While I have been a reader for many years, I found the change a year or so ago, from mak­ing a com­ment be­low the ar­ti­cle to need­ing yet an­other lo­gin on an­other site in or­der to do so frus­trat­ing to the point of be­ing dis­ap­pointed and even un­will­ing to con­tribute in my own opin­ion. Please try and change so that the reader does not need yet an­other lo­gin to be an ad­di­tion to the topic.

Roberto: Hi Rod­ney – I com­pletely agree with you; I've never loved the re­moval of the com­ments that we en­acted a cou­ple of years ago there was a rea­son. The for­mer com­ment­ing plat­form (Dis­qus) fell apart and stopped no­ti­fy­ing us of new com­ments. It be­came un­ten­able be­cause many com­ments were trolls or bots that we no longer could eas­ily mon­i­tor. Here's my sug­ges­tio­nand I would love to have your feed­back. What do would you think if, with a rea­son­ably short turn­around time, we were post to post com­ments we re­ceive via email or so­cial me­dia at the bot­tom of the blog en­try, with a re­sponse when ap­pro­pri­ate. Thanks again for read­ing STC, we very much ap­pre­ci­ate it!

Rod­ney: YES to the ex­cel­lent so­lu­tion you pro­pose. As a re­tiree from a small uni­ver­sity, STC is a won­der­ful op­por­tu­nity to con­sider and ex­plore the var­ied top­ics un­der the um­brella of our fields. Thank you for your ef­forts on STC's be­half

 

From Fer­nando: An im­por­tant as­pect is if a blog com­ment can be quoted in an aca­d­e­mic pub­li­ca­tion. Ac­cord­ing to the "Re­search In­tegrity" rules of Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity, YES (see here). Are blog­gers aware of this?

Roberto: Fer­nando, you raise an ex­cel­lent point and one that STC read­ers should be made aware of. Aside from per­haps writ­ing a full post on the pros and cons of cit­ing from blogs, I'm im­me­di­ately post­ing your com­ment with the link in­cluded to in­form our read­ers.

 

From Gosse: Dear Roberto and oth­ers, As a re­tired mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy pro­fes­sor I have been read­ing your posts for many, many years. And I used quite some ma­te­r­ial in it for my classes. Just keep on go­ing with STC posts, mi­cro­bi­ol­ogy stays too in­ter­est­ing to stop. Then I will keep read­ing them.

Roberto: Dear Gosse, your words are won­der­ful feed­back. It is par­tic­u­larly nice to have peo­ple like you who have fol­lowed STC for a long time. We'll keep at it!

 

From na­ture­poker: I ad­mit my heart skipped a bit just read­ing the ti­tle of the post. Gen­er­a­tive con­tent could never re­place the hu­man his­tory and con­cern be­hind these posts. As a long time on-again-off-again reader I'm ea­gerly look­ing for­ward to new ar­ti­cles and cat­e­gories.

Christoph: Thank you!

 

From Emily Stowe: STC is an amaz­ing re­source for teach­ing! I of­ten send my un­der­grads to read it and have de­vel­oped an as­sign­ment for them to write some­thing for STC.

Christoph: Thank you and yes, do en­cour­age your stu­dents to write some­thing for STC. Ac­tu­ally, Elio had started this for sem­i­nars he gave, and we have nu­mer­ous posts by stu­dents in our archive.