We're doing a small beta test of our Science For Kids site.(1) It isn't perfect yet but that's why we need people to try it out. Once we find any glaring bugs we can sort those out and finish the cosmetic stuff.
For Scientific Blogging columnists, you can just log in and go to it. Everything is all set. For new people who sign up the articles will go into moderation, because, let's face it, we're writing for kids and our names are on the thing so we can't make it a free-for-all.
Unlike ScientificBlogging, this does not have feature articles or chat or a lot of the social networking stuff we have here. It does have a section for experiments, so if you're willing to get out a still or video camera and write an article up and show the experiment, it will be a big hit.
During the last month we've had discussions with a number of educational groups and they all like the idea of another science site for young people. One or two are likely even relieved that it isn't another effort by academia that's more side project than true take on it. Unlike academic sites, we don't get any grants - if this thing is not good, we lost a lot of money spent on development so we want it to be good.
There's no size limit. In our internal testing, some of the articles are more like trivia and are a few sentences long.
If you want to pitch in, please do. If not, well, you're already doing your part for science outreach by writing here so that's okay too.
NOTES:
(1) So why didn't we get the ScienceForKids.com URL? Because it's parked at one of those web domain scam outfits and they never wrote us back. Plus, in 2009 the content is more important than the URL. 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' are not exactly the kinds of names a marketing person would have picked.
