This blog is for sale

Researchblogging released the finalists of the research blog of the year. I'm giving my respectful congratulations to all the finalists. According to Researchblogging:

all our finalists, who represent the best blogging about peer-reviewed research on the Internet!

This blog was nominated in two categories: 'best expert-level blog' and 'biology blog', but didn't pass the selection made by the expert panel of ten judges. Of course, I was eager to see the selected finalists in the categories of my interest. There were 15 finalists. Good, over 15 blogs only 1 is currently in my blogroll, so I was likely to discover

the best of the best [...]over 1000 blogs members of Researchblogging.

I'm a great supporter of Researchblogging, but I don't know (and I don't understand) which criteria were utilized to decide the final list: the 'blog of the year' concurs for a prize of 1000 dollars. What I know, is that productivity was NOT considered. In fact, in the list there are blogs with very few posts marked with the classic icon for peer-reviewed research (I'm including in red this blog just for reference purposes).

BEST BIOLOGY BLOG (scored by productivity*)

BEST EXPERT-LEVEL BLOG (scored by productivity*)

Productivity per-se does not mean anything: internet is full of 'empty blogs' containing something like the 'lorem ipsum' filler. Thus, I wondered also about popularity. For reference, I scored the blogs according to the number of views generated in the Researchblogging network. Apparently, popularity was not considered.

BEST BIOLOGY BLOG (scored by popularity*)

BEST EXPERT-LEVEL BLOG (scored by popularity*)

I'm sure to be a very-bad writer, and I'm not pretending to write common interesting things in this niche-blog, but I don't consider serious of researchblogging to include in its best of the best, blogs with only 8, 3 or even 0 (zero!) icon-posts. The researchbloggin icon was designed to:

distinguish your serious posts from news, politics, family, bagpipes

and serious icon-posting means to accomplish strict mandatory guidelines in the communication of the scientific research and to influence official citation metrics. Researchblogging, being irrespectful of its own icon, was irrespectful of its origins and of most of its productive and popular bloggers**.

I'm very happy: today, after 2 difficult months, I finally got a sharp band in my immunoprecipitation, this is going to leverage my new project. Yesterday, my paper was accepted from a very good journal in the field. And tomorrow it's my Birthday (I turn 30). Who cares about the prize? Should I sell my reportergene.com domain for 1000 bucks? Maybe to a company developing reporter genes... Argh, believe it or not, the bigger company in the field of reportergenes has recently opened its blog and...
...that blog is a researchblogging finalist in the category 'new blog of the year', with 8 icon-posts and 351 views.

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* statistics refers to February 25, 2010 right after the official announcement.
** I should say that not necessarily blogs without icon are not serious: the opposite! In fact the only blog in my blogroll, which is finalist with 0 icons, is Brain Windows. It's my preferred blog and definitively I'm going to vote for him.