I recieved this email a few days ago:

Hi Brian - awesome site you got there - can't believe you keep it running on your own!

I just registered with you. It seems you would like more blogs and I would like to start a science blog. I have difficulties to start on certain platforms (I am behind the great firewall here in China and cannot easily get to sites like blogspot), and I do not want to blog with the pseudo scientists at Huffington post or anything like that. However, I cannot find out how to blog on your site - at least from the profile there seems to be no way to get started. Whats the trick?

Sincerely
Sascha
------------------------------------
Dr. Sascha Vongehr
Department of Philosophy and
National Key Laboratory of Solid-State Microstructures
Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Nanjing University
Kexue Jishu Guan 324
Hankou Lu 22, Nanjing, Gulou District, Jiangsu Province 210093
P.R. China

He sounded like an interesting character, so I told him that blogging was by invite only, and we'd also need to see a sample blog post. So he wrote up a sample. It sounds like an interesting topic. What do you all think? I'd especially like Kelly's opinion from the physics side because I'm not strong in this

Take a look at his guest post. It's not "live" just saved. Post is here

He also has a profile at USC here: Profile

I'm not saying we need this person by any means, just entertaining an audition.

Pros:
-He bolsters the underrepresented physics side of the house.
-Seems to have a good perspective.

Cons:
-Will he have posting issues do to govt restrictions? But him talking about the restrictions impinging upon science is also a bonus.
-I agree with Evie the post was a little hard to follow along with.

tl;dr right now, but the intro was OK. I am more a low-numbers kind of guy. One of the problems with the other network I write for is the massive inflation after their big bang (

I wasn't terribly excited by the writing. I thought it sounded a bit more like a lecture than a blog post.

I'd agree with DGT. I think part of what makes a blogger someone you want to read is that the individual's personality comes through in the writing. In this case, I'm not getting a real sense of that.

If we want more physics people I'm all for it, but I don't think we should take on a new blogger for that reason alone.

I'm reluctant to vote no. I think there's some promise there, but he needs to work on his writing.

I'm not a super writer, so I don't want to harp too much on this guy's post. And I am willing to consider the possibility that my problems come from an inability to understand where is argument is coming from since I'm not a physicist. But I've tried to read this 3 times and keep finding it impenetrable.

i'd say that's an overall no then... i had a look to see if i could find any blogging platforms that can be used in china to recommend to him, the websites all seem to be in chinese (unsurprisingly lol) though so i couldn't really tell what was going on with them.