Blogosphere spring cleaning

As you may have noticed I have been adding some more links to the blog. I have also removed a few that didn't work anymore and generally thought a bit more about who I want to link to and why. Generally I will link to you if I read your blog regularly or if you link to me. I also link to some fellow postdocs who post on the "what's up postdoc" carnivals. If you read my blog and would like your link in the side bar, let me know.

When I started blogging two years ago (on another blog) I was a lonely and frustrated graduate student desperate for contact to someone/ anyone in the circus that is academia who were not my advisors. I cast my net wide and joined organisations and fora, listservs, groups and networks and searched for blogs, diaries, real life stories and anything I would come across. I still read some of the blogs I came across during this frantic search for connection and company, others have disappeared or I have lost interest and others I have come back to. Most of the blogs I was able to dig up were written by people living in the US or Canada, and at the time blogging seemed to be a foreign concept to most people where I was. Since then blogging has exploded here and while I have no intentions of cutting out my fave blogs from other parts of the world, it would be nice to meet people from my region too. While my focus is not on factual research, I often wish I knew about more blogging people in my own field, and I have tailored my new links list so that it reflects my location, work and general interests a bit better than the old one did.

I have deliberately searched the blogosphere for some new links to people in my geographical area and of course Danish, Swedish and Norwegian graduate students, professors and science geeks are blogging too. I have also chosen to be more flexible regarding language and allow links to blogs fully or partly written in Scandinavian languages as well. If you belong in any of these categories and read my blog I'd be happy to link to you too. I think it would be nice to have blogosphere friends on this side of the pond as well.

I have also been searching for people in my broader research field. I have added a few link to earth science people who blog about research, work, life or all of it. Blogging doesn't seem to be particularly big with people in my field, but maybe that just makes it all the easier to connect with the few brave ones out there.

Other than that I have been playing around with technorati and their new "tag cloud" feature, but I can't get the cloud to show on my page. If anyone has tried this and made it work I'd love to hear what you did. I can only get a link to the cloud on the technorati page, but not show it directly on my blog. WTF?

ETA: Thanks to nice and helpful technorati people the tag cloud problem is now magically solved. Thanks.