In the spirit of a new dawn for soil science, three new soil centric blogs have popped up in 2010.

It is rare to see a blog post on soil science research

SEO BASICS

Author: Cindy Woudenberg

If you are a business owner with a website, you know that everyone is talking about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and the positive impact it can have on your business. Is SEO alone enough to increase sales? Can you do the work yourself, or should you hire an SEO consultant? You don’t need to be proficient in web development or a marketing expert to make an educated decision about small business SEO.

Wednesday, June 8th nscss.org had 1018 visits, with 985 visits the next day. We have been steadily increasing since we changed to Drupal in the Fall of 2008. Before that we would get 200 daily.

For some time now, since 1996 , NSCSS has been a chapter of SSSA, but in stealth mode: that status was never represented on the SSSA website. NSCSS was listed as a cooperating society but not as an affiliated chapter. Sometime in the recent weeks, that changed, and we at NSCSS are grateful.

Maybe file this under business survival skills. Everyone is hurting on the budget these days, so sharing some home economizing tales from the trenches maybe isn't too off base. Of course its my blog and I can do what I want. Plus, diplomat that I am, I am pretty sure anyone who might be offended by my posting non-professional content on the NSCSS website probably doesn't have the skill set to follow my personal blog. I look forward to being corrected if i am wrong on that. I am definitely not tagging this post to the Recent Articles page though.

Something "different" is going on with NSCSS' private sector soil science job listings.

First, I want to go back in history. In the late 70's and early 80's I learned that civil engineers were legally licensed as registered engineers. The Florida Department of Health Department (FDOH), including their predecessor agencies, would normally accept the data the engineers submitted for permitted septic tank absorption fields. In very late 1982, the predecessor agency to the FDOH mandated the sole use of USDA SCS methodology.

Well, several rumors have been going around about Florida Senate Bill 1318 that are not correct. As I see it, this will attempt to explain how this transpired.

A draft site specific soil survey standard is progressing in commitee towards consideration by the Western Conference of the National Cooperative Soil Survey. The sponsoring OSU Soils Committee is seeking feedback from private sector soil scientists. Deadline is April 15, 2009. Contact information is on the cover.

Can you steer me to some quality info about E & O insurance and other aspects of setting up a hole-in-the wall consulting business?

Laurens Rademakers, Biochar Fund, reports on his discovery of an apparently ancient Terra Preta tradition in a remote part of Africa.

TIME has an article: Why Global Warming Portends a Food Crisis:

There is a wealth of unpublished scientific data that is almost impossible for the larger scientific community to benefit from. It is developed off the beaten path, in the long tail of scientific data. This is science's dark data and it constitutes a large mass of scientific information. The collections that make up the dark data of science are numerous, being generated by thousands of scientists, on a much broader number of scientific questions than covered by published data, and in a complex array of formats.

Peter Ward argues that life on earth is naturally harmful to itself.