The 'bidding' for a spot on David Bradley's Periodic Table of Science Bloggers has been fast and furious for several days now. It started on March 18^th when David, who is behind the sciencebase.com blog took the familiar Periodic Table and bent it a bit in a very clever manner that has turned out to be a big hit.
For instance the element formerly known as Lithium (Li) is now David Bradley on LinkedIn. Ti, or Titanium, becomes the sciencebase account on Twitter, and the link to the main sciencebase blog page replaces Antimony in the number 51 spot. 

While  David is a pretty busy guy online there is no way he could find enough of his own activities for the entire Table. Besides, David knows what science communication is all about and realised there was an opportunity to reach out to the online community of science bloggers and writers and put out the challenge to other people to finish off the table. I haven't had the opportunity to ask him, but I'm willing to bet he didn't expect to see everyone take to it so quickly. He suggested it would be nice to fill it before the end of the month but he filled in just 3 days. It wasn't bidding in the true sense of the word perhaps, because David wasn't out to sell the spots. Rather it was a case of everyone making a pitch to be included and trying to be inventive at time to make initials, subject matter or location fit an element.

This wasn't just a pitch exercise to come up with a neat graphic.
It is a hyperlinked table at http://www.sciencebase.com/periodic-table-of-david-bradley.html  where can click on one of the elements and you'll jump to the new matching blog or website. It generated a lot of comments on the original blog posting and enough Twitter activity to spread the word. In the process everyone involved in posting their suggestions got a kind of a virtual introduction to each other and to their work, and anyone else following the comments likely had a whole new world of links open up.
David as @sciencebase and Genome Alberta as @mikesgene follow each other on Twitter and I'm pleased to say that I saw his post very early on and pushed Gallium out in favour of Genome Alberta's blog pages.

I won't go through the entire table but here are a few worth looking at:

• Lr  deservedly goes to the Genomics Law Report a blog run by lawyer Dan Vorhaus at http://www.genomicslawreport.com/ . If you have any interest at all about where genetics, law, and society come together or where the split apart, Dan's blog and Twitter postings are worth following.
• No  or Nobelium was snapped up by the official website for the Nobel Prize. http://nobelprize.org/ .  Who would have dared try to elbow that one of the Table
• Tc  or Technetium now stands for the 2020Science blog. Not sure how that fits? Andrew Maynard who writes the blog says his blog is all about developing science and technology responsibly. He generally offers up some thought provoking ideas and as the Chief Science Adviser at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, he knows what he is talking about. Read more:  http://2020science.org/about
• Ne is the home of Nature Networks, the http://Nature.com blog where Neon would normally appear
• Md  aka Mendelevium would be the Math Dude, a research scientist at the California Institute of Technology who maintains http://mathdude.quickanddirtytips.com/  
• Ag or Silver  was claimed by Agence Science Presse at http://www.sciencepresse.qc.ca/  which is one of the few Canadian entries at on the periodic table  
• Cd  for Cadmium went to Culture Dish the blog Mo Bio laboratories at http://www.mobio.com/blog/
• Ho was the final element (Holmium ) to go and it went to Hilary Sutcliffe's blog at http://www.matterforall.org/blog/ where she writes about "making new technolgies matter for us all".

David organized the table so that his own links and site appear in gold,  bio sites are green, grey is for math/physics, blue is medical, red are chemical, black are space, bronze are general or uncategorised.

The links will take you to science bloggers, researchers on Twitter, Facebook groups, and writers from all over the world. They come from industry, academia, government and students, with the youngest person I've come across on the list being only 15 years old.  Four Canadian sites make it to the list which given the international scope of the list isn't all bad but we should have done a lot better. The 4 sites are us here at Genome Alberta, Agence Science Presse noted above  Dr. Carin Bondar who calls herself "A Biologist with a Twist" and Cath Ennis based in Vancouver. I also came across a couple of Canadian educated researchers now working outside the country. 

Is it because we're just being too Canadian and not wanting to blow our own horn? Or is it what I've come to see as an ongoing problem where we simply don't want to take a step outside the comfortable research surroundings and share what we do?
Many researchers don't need a blog, not every project needs a Facebook page, and Twitter isn't for everyone. Judging by the Canuck science community response to David's idea though, there maybe very few willing to share anything at all.

Find out a lot more about David Bradley on his about page and be sure to visit the Periodic Table of Science Bloggers on his main site.