The blog facTotem

	After eight years the collaborators had the recent opportunity to meet socially; the collaboration had been almost entirely conducted by e-mail and occa­sionally by phone.

At the beginning of 2008, the editors of Natural History magazine, asked two sci­ence nerds—the magazine’s then copy editor, Annie Gottlieb, and Webmaster, Jim Van Abbema—to try writing and il­lus­trating, respectively, an online blog on the magazine’s Web site. The subject mat­ter of the blog was to be furnished by Gott­lieb’s fact checking responsibili­ties, which often led off down fascinat­ing side trails from articles in the magazine.

The impromptu collaboration that ensued for the next year and a half turned out to be one of the most fun, compatible, and fruitful of both participants’ working lives. Provoked by Gottlieb’s findings and mus­ings, Van Abbema crafted visual equiva­lents, accompaniments, and enhance­ments that made each blog post, more then just a commentary, an experience, and a portal to further adventures in the vast online science universe. After the post-2008 funding drought killed off the blog (and very nearly the magazine), we deemed the experiment worth preserving. It is recreated here in its entirety.