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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 475 | Comments: 14
Last by Genomic Repairman on Oct 13, 2010, 2:41pm


In the spirit of all of the bribes and contests going on this month for DonorsChoose, I will donate all of the advertising revenue the site generates this month to the DonorsChoose campaign of the blogger who has the most blog views. Last month the site brought in $50 so there's at least $50 up for grabs! Happy blogging and may the best writer win!

The counts start retroactively from October 1st. I assume none of you will cheat and click on your own blog posts a billion and 12 times... Play nice.

To see the projects that we've selected to vet, please visit our donors choose page: HERE

Oh, and it's against the Google TOS for me to ask you to click on ads. So don't just randomly click on a bunch of ads that you wouldn't have clicked on before... Don't want to get in trouble with "the man."

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 937 | Comments: 8
Last by Brandi Badass on Feb 04, 2011, 11:35am


Sometimes treating your employees like crap backfires in your face.

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1282 | Comments: 5
Last by Nikkilina on Oct 14, 2010, 2:01pm


Checking out early in Angry's lab requires extreme circumstances

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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1179 | Comments: 11
Last by Thomas Joseph on Sep 02, 2010, 11:56am
It's time for a contest, and not some lame contest where all you get is a crappily made t-shirt. This contest offers a treasure trove of novelty junk that could surely have bought Manhattan or some other island back in the early days of screwing over American Indians.

There are two prize packages to be had and these will be awarded to the two LabSpaces members who have the highest point totals for the month. Both of them are pretty damn sweet though.

Package #1 contains an IDT Lab notebook, 2 IDT clickable sharpies, an EtonBio Pen, an Invitrogen Pen, and Invitrogen Lanyard, two LabSpaces stickers, AND an freaking sweet LabSpaces coffee mug! I can see you drooling already. If you ask nicely, I might even autograph it for you...





Package #2 has 2 IDT clickable sharpies, an EtonBio Pen, an invitrogen Pen, an Invitrogen Lanyard, 2 LabSpaces stickers, an EtonBio color-changing coffee mug, AND a LabSpaces Bumper sticker!








Finally, you get to choose ONE of 4 different T-shirts (while supplies and sizes last).



I have a bunch of the IDT shirts in small, medium and large. I have various colors of the EtonBio shirts in small, medium and Large, and I have only XL Invitrogen shirts.

How do I e . . . More
Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1349 | Comments: 3
Last by Thomas Joseph on Aug 30, 2010, 8:44am
This one looked way funnier in my brain, I swear...

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 888 | Comments: 4
Last by Custom labels on Mar 18, 2011, 12:52am
I've gotten extremely busy lately, and so I decided to start a bumper sticker series for science geeks and politicians. Here's #1 in the series. Maybe I'll convince Brian to Zazzle them if you demand, no promises though. He's kind of up tight. This of course is inspired by all of those ridiculous pro-life/focus on the family unintelligent garbage hillbilly moron bumper stickers I see disgracing our roadways.

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1257 | Comments: 3
Last by Mod Scientist on Jul 21, 2010, 6:21pm
Read about the fiasco in detail here or here

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Author: Angry Scientist | Views: 1032 | Comments: 0
Bicarbonate buffering is very important both in your body and in maintaining tissue culture cells. Tissue culture incubators maintain a strict CO2 concentration, except for when people don't check the tanks and they go dry. Normally, tissue culture media is a bright pink color, whereas when the pH increases due to a loss of CO2, the media turns purple.

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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 403 | Comments: 0
I've been wanting to institute an awards system on the site for a while. It seems to be the "in" thing to do in social networking, plus it gives users a warm fuzzy feeling on the inside to be ranked and loved/hated by their peers.

The system is pretty simple. You get points for posting comments, submitting links, and getting "likes" from other users. You can lose points by being overly spammy/abusive and through dislikes by other members. It should be fun and interesting and hopefully its an incentive to spur discussions and get people to submit more external links! The top users each month and the top users of all time will have their names and a link to their profiles posted on the front page for everyone to see.

I'm going to use this month to work the bugs out of the system (I already fixed a few today!), but next month I will start dishing out swag from IDT, Invitrogen, and Eton Bio based on the points values each month. Happy posting :) I'll put up another blog post detailing the contest, rules, and post pictures of the various prize packages. I have a shelf full of pens, t-shirts, and other goodies! . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 749 | Comments: 0
Hopefully you noticed that I spent the last few days redesigning the website. It was long overdue. I was really tired of the look of the old website and it wasn't organized in a way that let you get at a good look at all of the news that was available on the site. I hope you agree that the new design is much less crappy than the old one. At the very least its cleaner and has more white space :)

I also decided to remove a few of the "features" i had programmed in before. I took out the citation manager because it really served no purpose other than to let you share and recommend citations to your friends and lab mates. I just saw it as a very watered down version of cite-u-like and I don't think it would get much use. Plus it took up a lot of valuable real-estate in the user navigation menu...

Additionally, I removed the blogs link. Previously I had allowed anyone with an account to have a blog, but more recently only spammers have been using it to post about casino deals or post lame press releases about healthcare technology. Sorry, but I'm not giving away free advertising! I have since decided to recruit a number of my scientist friends to write blogs for the website. I'll put up a more detailed post about who they are and what the . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 474 | Comments: 0
The results of the press release have been great. The story will run for a week as the cover story of the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine web page. I was also contacted by a laboratory publication and they will be running an article about my site as a companion to a featured article of there's talking about how scientists can use social tools to better science. It'll be interesting to read about some of their ideas. I also got a few phone calls and e-mails from journal publishers that may be interested in supporting the site. This would be really great for the site and hopefully drive more users here. More details about these talks later if they actually flesh out. I'm pretty excited about it!

I think I'm going to start a new blog series that reviews the other social networks in the scientific community. A new one springs up just about every month and from my experience in perusing them (you always have to keep an eye on the competition ;) ) I have found them to be severely lacking in content and avenues for communication in the sciences. Haha, of course I'm slightly biased, but I think it would be fun to do a blog series comparing their technologies to mine. . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 514 | Comments: 0
Here are the first 2 links:

Iowa City Press Citizen

UIowa Release Site

I was informed today that it will be posted to EurekAlert and Newswise (My two main featured article sources). This could generate a huge amount of buzz about the site. I'm EXTREMELY excited to see what happens over the next week (I hope my web host doesn't crash :P).

I'll Update this post throughout the week with more links.

Newswise link is up:
http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/545446/

EurekAlert denied it because "they don't accept articles about websites." Haha, maybe that came about as a result of the little discussion Patrick McGinness and I had about using them as a source... Oh well, I've seen plenty of articles come out of them that are about websites, so this smells very fishy to me. . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 541 | Comments: 0
About a month ago I contacted the University of Iowa press office about the website. I told them I wasn't sure if it was what they would consider "news," and pitched them a small blurb about the site. To my surprise they were excited enough about it to send over a reporter from their office to interview me for a press release. I got the proof of the press release on Thursday, made a couple of minor edits, and it will be released this Thursday (Oct 16). They're also going to make the article that was written about the site a featured article on the Carver College of Medicine homepage!

I'm really excited to see who I hear from on Thursday and Friday. Hopefully the press release generates a lot of interest and gets more people on here to help me further develop the site into a useful scientific community.

I'll post some links on Thursday. It might be tacky if I run the press release as a featured article on my website ;) . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 825 | Comments: 0
I've been working on a few redesign ideas in my head. I really didn't like the layout of the front page, so I changed it :) I think this look is a little cleaner and less busy. I also like dividing up the featured articles and the main stream news articles. I like parts of this layout, but don't be surprised if I tweak it some over the next couple of days :)

There's a pretty cool announcement coming early next week. I'll post about it then!

Let me know what you think of the new layout. . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1415 | Comments: 0
This past week I found a couple of Social networks for the sciences that have launched in the last few months. One was advertising itself as the "First" social network for the sciences, although its only been live for a month. I went live in the summer of 2006, Nature's goofy little network went live in December of 2006, followed by Biomed Experts and Researchcrossroads in January. So it seems that I have a little bit of competition out there (Although I'm ahead of all but 2 in Alexa rankings...) That just means I have to be more creative than them. I think I'm capable :)

This next ad campaign is going to focus on the things that have worked for me in the past, I'm just going to multiply the monetary input by a factor of...haha, I guess I won't let too many secrets out.

I also have some other more inventive plans floating around in my head. More about those in a few weeks! Enjoy the news and tell your friends! . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1485 | Comments: 0
I decided to do a little more advertising this week. I'm still running this site on a shoestring budget but I decided $60/month in advertising is doable.

I'm currently running a $40 Fark ad for the week. You can see it Here.

In addition I decided to test out StumbleUpon's ad service. Now if you don't know what StumbleUpon is, I encourage you to check them out because it really is a genius concept. The site is typical social bookmarking site with the small exception that it relies on a Fire Fox browser plug-in. This plug-in basically gives you a direct connection to stumbleupon and adds a set of buttons to your tool bar for looking up new websites. The cool part is that there's a randomizer button that you click and it takes you to a random site (with in a bunch of preferred categories that you set). Now, you can also pay for stumbles, which is what I have done. Feedback has been pretty positive so far, so hopefully this helps spread the word.

I also made a Facebook group and a . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1485 | Comments: 0
Well, its been a little less than 2 weeks since I spent $200 on a PRweb news release. I thought the release was well written and on an interesting topic, but I guess it didn't grab the attention of the PRweb subscribers. I should have been tipped off that this might be a problem since a large number of the releases on that site are for tech items. Haha, or maybe people just don't care about a science social network. I won't give up just yet though, but here are the stats.

-177 visits from PRweb clicks
-That's $1.30 per click (ouch, my google average is $0.20)
-4 new 'users' ($25 per new user, bigger ouch)
-PRweb says the article was read on their site 1034 times(which means only 17% of those viewers clicked over to my site)
-The news article was displayed 75,000 times over news feeds and 30,000 times on the PRweb main page

For a comparison...

My $160 Yahoo! Campaign ($100 of that was free introductory advertising)
-142,000 impressions (the ads have been show that many times)
-1,100 clicks and an average of $0.12 per click
-The 'new' users from above may actually be a result of this campaign, well, we know at least one of them wasn't

So sadly, I didn't get even a hundredth of the exposure I was hoping for out of t . . . More
Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1855 | Comments: 2
Last by Brian Krueger, PhD on Apr 22, 2008, 2:00pm
I initially got 300 extra clicks from my $200 investment. That's about $1 a click or a really bad day with google Adwords. I guess I shouldn't have expected a whole lot out of the release, but I was hoping it'd be picked up by at least a few science blogs or something.

The next phase of my advertising campaign is going to be a little more local I think. I e-mailed my press release to all of the area newspapers. I remember a few weeks back the Des Moines Register ran a story about some guy's car washing business. Hopefully they'll be interested in some graduate student's internet business :) I'm also looking to do some table spamming on Monday all over the medical campus. Look for my signs. My latest plan is to get a local following from Iowa on the site and then maybe that will attract other users to stop by and comment or sign up for an account.

Looks like it's back to Yahoo!, Google, and Fark ads :(

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Author: LabSpaces.net | Views: 1592 | Comments: 0
I spent the last month or so researching some good ways to promote the site. I had been using google adwords, but I got very mixed results and had few users stick around for more than one or two clicks (that was also back when the site was the "green monster" so who knows if I'd have better luck now).

More recently, I have read a bunch of blog articles about how using a PRweb news release drove new users to their site during their initial launch. I figured I'd give it a try. And wrote a news release: See it here. It got a 5 out of 5 editorial score which I'm not completely sure what that means, but I assume its good (or just a result of me spending $200 on the release...). The release went live this morning at 12am and I've seen a marginal increase in the amount of traffic to the site, and unfortunately most of them are one clickers :(

Hopefully things pick up a bit over the next few weeks as a result of the news release being posted to multiple news feeds. I'd hate to think I blew $200 :( I'll save my final verdict for next Monday. So stay tuned and I'll post the stats! Cross your fingers for me though, I think I� . . . More
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