The transhumanist community and news site Betterhumans has moved into the latest of its recent redesigns. As you might expect, I'm pleased to see items from the Longevity Meme daily news gracing the front page - the feed is there to be made use of, after all.

On much the same note, and as I'm sure a number of you have noticed, I have been crossposting some Fight Aging! posts to Betterhumans of late. Given the size and interests of our community, it wasn't obvious to me that this would actually result in anyone new reading more about healthy life extension research and activism. As it turns out, however, this was a successful experiment in broadening the audience. I will continue to crosspost as the fancy takes me.

I consider broadening the audience to be a worthwhile and very necessary endeavor, although any significant broadening is going to happen largely as a result of new folk jumping in to write about healthy life extension. We can never have too many new voices to swell the conversation and help raise awareness and support for meaningful scientific research aimed at extending the healthy human life span. Broadening one's own audience really can't be done haphazardly, however - a little thought needs to go into how to spend the effort. It's all too easy to wind up missing opportunities, talking to the unreceptive, or talking to no-one at all. I turned down a spot in the launch of Seed's ScienceBlogs, for example, and I think that's looking like the right decision. Individual blogs are becoming increasingly buried, you're locked into someone else's publishing platform, and I would have had to give up generous advertisers who donate to the MPrize and appearing in Google News via the MPrize website. Not that Seed isn't offering a good package for a certain type of blog and blogger - it's just that Fight Aging! are I are not it.

If you take one thing away from this rather self-indulgent and rambling post it should be that you have a voice - and making yourself heard online is essentially free beyond the time you spend doing it. If you're clear and passionate about healthy life extension, and post consistently, you will receive links and attention - and thereby add to the level of awareness and support for the fight to cure aging. This is a good thing; more people should be doing it.

Technorati tags: blogging, transhumanism

Posted by Reason at July 17, 2006 9:24 PM | TrackBack (0)