Rogue Scholar archives science blog posts written in a variety of languages, but 85% of the content is in English. Weekly newsletters of German, Spanish or French blog posts where launched a few months ago, but for English-language posts that is not practical with currently about 150 new blog posts per month. One solution is newsletters focusing on blog posts in specific subject areas, and I started that with the subject area Information Systems also a few months ago.

Another approach is a curated weekly newsletter of 3-10 featured posts and I launched this newsletter this week. Every Monday the newsletter will send out a summary of some of the posts I liked the previous week, taking advantage of a new featured custom metadata field:

Featured blog posts can then be filtered in the search interface, and this can of course be combined with our queries:

This weekly newsletter is a reimplementation of the same idea that I started in 2023 as Front Matter Gazette and then Syldavia Gazette, but couldn't maintain because of the manual effort required to generate a weekly newsletter in parallel to building Rogue Scholar.

You can sign up for the featured posts newsletter via the Rogue Scholar mailing lists form, or directly from the English-language landing page, which starting this week shows the 10 most recent featured English-language posts rather than all recent English-language posts.

There are three challenges with this new newsletter: a) the regular effort required to curate blog posts, b) an email newsletter rather than an RSS feed (the standard way of how blog posts are consumed), and c) the totally subjective selection of posts. I hope that a) can be managed by the built-in automation Rogue Scholar has already, b) can be overcome over time (i.e. Rogue Scholar offering aggregated RSS feeds), and c) is the very nature of curation. Going forward we might see comments that explain why a post was featured, groups of curators, and/or peer reviewed blog posts – something that is possible but currently very rare.

Please use Slack, email, Mastodon, or Bluesky if you have any questions or comments.

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References

  1. Fenner, M. (2023, January 30). Launching the Front Matter Gazette. Front Matter. https://doi.org/10.53731/88drdpz-znvdjr9
  2. Marcum, C. S. (2025, April 8). Peer-Review for a Blog Post? My Experience with MetaROR. Upstream. https://doi.org/10.54900/bymaz-4fw37