I'm not generally a big user of social networking sites, but I did decide to join Atheist Nexus yesterday. If you're there too, you can find me there and add me as a friend.

I wanted to write a quick post to thank all the Daylight Atheism readers who were able to attend yesterday's meetup in Pasadena. We got a great crowd together, and it was a thrilling experience to meet you all and to finally be able to match names with faces, and I'm greatly appreciative for the warmth, good company, and great conversation. (Plus, assembling at the restaurant and splitting the check turned out to be ridiculously easy. Who ever said that organizing atheists was like herding cats?)

I don't know exactly when I'll next be out on the West Coast, but this is something we'll definitely have to do again. Maybe a New York City meetup would be a sensible next step - it would certainly involve less travel for me! Anyone out there who's interested?

For all DA readers in the Los Angeles area (if any):

Three weeks from now, on the weekend of September 5, I'm going to be in California to attend a friend's wedding. The weekend is booked solid, but my flight back to New York leaves from Los Angeles on Tuesday the 8th, and I'll have that Monday free.

So, do I have any readers in or near L.A. who'll be around on Labor Day and are interested in meeting up? It would probably be later in the day, around dinnertime. If you'll be available and are interested, e-mail me (ebonmusings@gmail.com) or leave a comment below. If you know any good restaurants you'd recommend, or other interesting things to do, please feel free to mention that as well.

I was asked in e-mail to pass along news of this contest, which some Daylight Atheism readers may be interested in.

Quark Expeditions is sponsoring a "Blog Your Way to Antarctica" contest. Anyone can submit a 300-word essay explaining why they should be the one to join a voyage to Antarctica scheduled for February 2010, and the entrant who gets the most votes will become the trip's official blogger and will post daily updates about their experience.

Here's the list of current entrants. (There are a lot of them; I suggest sorting by popularity.) A valid e-mail address is required to register, and you can then vote for your favorite candidate (or possibly your least favorite, depending on how you view the idea of an Antarctic voyage). You can also enter the contest yourself, although judging by the current top vote-getters, there's some stiff competition. The deadline for voting is noon on September 30.

Full disclosure: I was asked to pass this along by Devorah Bennu, a.k.a. GrrlScientist, who's currently the second highest vote-getter in the contest. As there's more than one person in the rankings whom I know, I'm not going to make an endorsement myself. But I do encourage you to read the various entrance essays and judge for yourself who's the most qualified. May the best candidate win!

I'm thrilled to announce that 3 Quarks Daily has officially chosen the winners of their 2009 Science Prize, and their first-place award, the Top Quark, has gone to Daylight Atheism!

Here's what 3QD's celebrity judge, Professor Steven Pinker, had to say:

Daylight Atheism’s Bands of Iron is my top pick. He starts with an something that attracts your attention purely on aesthetic grounds – stripes in a rock. He invokes it with deep, non-obvious, yet understandable principles, at the same time illuminating one of the most interesting phenomena in science – the coevolution of early life and the planet Earth –with a nod to a current issue for good measure.

Considering the quality of the competition, I'm amazed and humbled by this award. It's truly an honor. My deepest thanks to Prof. Steven Pinker, the editors of 3 Quarks Daily, and everyone who voted for me!

This post is purely to brag: the editors of the blog 3 Quarks Daily have selected the seven finalists for their 2009 Science Prize, and Daylight Atheism is among them!

My post "Bands of Iron" is one of the seven that will be sent to 3QD's celebrity judge, Steven Pinker, who will pick the ultimate winner in one week's time. Whether I win or not, it's an honor to have made it this far out of so many initial competitors. My deepest thanks, again, to everyone who voted for me! I'll be sure to keep you updated on what transpires.

I'm no PZ Myers, but I've always wanted to try my hand at stuffing a ballot box, and now I have an opportunity. The science and culture blog 3 Quarks Daily has officially begun the voting for its 2009 Science Prize, and I'm pleased to announce that two posts from Daylight Atheism are in the running!

Here are my two entries:

• The Age of Wonder
• Bands of Iron

The voting began today and closes in one week, on June 8. I'm up against some tough competition, including Carl Zimmer, Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy, and the physics bloggers from Cosmic Variance. I have no illusions that I'm going to win this vote outright - but I don't need to. Either (or both) of my posts only has to be among the top twenty vote-getters; out of those twenty, the site's editors will select six finalists, and the first, second and third-place winners will be chosen from those six by a celebrity judge, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. If I can make it even as far as the final round, I'll consider it a great honor.

So, you know what to do. If you like either of the posts I've linked above and consider them worthy contenders, please go to the voting page now and cast your ballot. (Right now DA is erroneously listed as "Daily Atheism" - I'll see if I can get that corrected —fixed - thanks, Abbas!). Let's see if we can put Daylight Atheism on the map!

UPDATE: Both of my nominated posts have made the semifinals. Thanks to everyone who voted!

I've put up a new post on Dangerous Intersection, a review of The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.

This is an open thread. Comments and discussion are welcome.

Since I've just wrapped up my series on blogging, it seemed appropriate to do this. This is an open thread purely for the purposes of self-promotion.

If you keep a blog or other site that you want us to know about, then now's the time! Feel free to leave a comment below telling us about yourself and your site: who you are, what you write about, and why we should be interested. (No commercial sites, please: this is not an invitation to spammers, obviously.) Both new and established bloggers are welcome to join in. You can do this however you like, but of course creativity will help you stand out from the pack. Show off your writing talent and hook us in!

Growing a Community

Yesterday's post offered advice to potential writers about starting a weblog of your own. This post addresses the next question: once your site is established, how do you get noticed and build up a readership?

Be a good citizen of the blogosphere. To make yourself known, it's essential to participate in the blogosphere at large. Leave intelligent comments on other sites; contribute to and host carnivals; and don't be afraid to e-mail popular bloggers when you've written something they may be interested in. By reaching out beyond your site to participate in others', you establish yourself as someone who's involved with the community and worth listening to.

Social bookmarking sites are your friends. In my experience, blog directories and post aggregators don't contribute much to your traffic. But social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Stumbleupon do help, a lot, and they're an essential way for curious visitors to find your site and become regular readers. Submit to them often, and provide links so that your readers can do so as well.

Build a corpus of work. Although social bookmarking sites help your site grow, I think that in the long run, your greatest friends are the search engines. They're the most reliable source of organic growth, rather than transient spikes. Of course, this means that you have to build up a substantial archive of written material so that search engine queries have a greater chance of coming across your site.

This also helps in another way: whenever writing something new, you can link to your own past posts discussing other aspects of the same issue. Anecdotally, I can say that this improves the "stickiness" of your site and encourages chance visitors to stay around and keep reading.

Nourish your commenting community. Comments make your site a thriving community rather than a monologue, and the presence of a friendly, insightful group of commenters can be the key factor in encouraging occasional visitors to become regular readers. Comments are your blog's lifeblood, and you want to encourage them as much as possible.

With that in mind, I think it's important to remove as many barriers to commenting as possible. If you require new commenters to register or solve convoluted CAPTCHAs, or hold up all comments for moderation, you'll stifle your own site's growth. (There are several minimally burdensome alternatives to keep out the scourge of all blogs, comment spammers.) You want commenting to be as open as possible so that anyone who might be tempted to leave a comment can do so. And be sure to join in your own comment threads! Answer questions, elaborate on your points, and address objections.

Be in control of the discussion. Of course, every site eventually has to deal with trolls and troublemakers. I see it as like maintaining a garden. On the whole it does best if left to itself, but every so often, you have to pull up some weeds. But it pays to have a light touch: be too zealous in your weeding and you'll pull up the good plants with the bad; be too lax and the weeds will strangle everything else.

On Daylight Atheism, I institute moderation for all first-time commenters. Once you've had one comment approved, you can comment freely in the future. This keeps out people whose only goal is to preach or stir up trouble. For troublemakers who do get past that hurdle, the next line of defense is to close down threads that turn into pointless flame wars. If the same people are repeatedly provoking fights and dragging threads off-topic, I give them a warning, and if that's not enough, I require all their comments to pass manual moderation. Only when people refuse to stop their bad behavior do I ban them. As a blog owner, banning is your ultimate weapon, and I advise against heavy-handed or indiscriminate use. It's harmful to your site's community and your wider reputation to give the impression that you ban people simply for disagreeing with you. It's best to institute a clear comment policy that sets out what is and is not allowed, and then stick to those rules.

Lastly, and most importantly of all...

Have patience and dedication. There's no royal road to popularity, and in blogging, as in anything else, acclaim never comes overnight. If you want a truly popular site, you have to expect that it can take anywhere from several months to several years to establish yourself. The internet is a crowded place, which means that new sites take time to gain a following. But it's not so crowded that merit doesn't win out! On the contrary, the uniquely open and democratic nature of the medium make it more of a level playing field than any other form of communication. If you routinely produce insightful, high-quality writing, your site will flourish and grow.