Skeptic History everywhere you look

Regular readers are aware of my Skeptic History calendar project. I’ve tried to research as many specific dates, birthdays, anniversaries and so on that relate to the history of skepticism. I then post them online.

I’ve learned some things myself in this research. And in posting the results online I hope to help connect newer skeptics with the long history of scientific skepticism.

As of this week, there are now seven different places online you can look for a little dose of skeptic history. And soon there might be more!

Daily Dose

The original form of Skeptic History was as a daily dose – a single fact posted each day on social media. I’m approaching 1,000 days of doing this, as the first post was February 16, 2009. Here’s where you can get your daily Skeptic History:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• FriendFeed
• Google Buzz

Yes, I know, I know. Who the heck uses FriendFeed or Google Buzz anymore? I’m not sure. And frankly it appears FriendFeed is getting a bit creaky, as it hasn’t updated my posts from Twitter in over a week. Bugs notwithstanding, they are still there if you need them.

Several skeptics have asked me to post to Google Plus. I’d love to add it to the mix, but in order to guarantee a post every day at a particular time I really need a way to automate it. I can do that for the existing services, but not for Plus. Yet.

Update: The day after I first posted this, Google announced that Buzz will be shut off in a few weeks. I guess I better figure out the automation thing for Plus.

Bi-Weekly

Back in March, 2010 I decided a second venue for Skeptic History was a good idea. Many of the facts never make it into the daily post, simply because there are too many other good coincidentally on the same day. I thought that a longer form, where I could tell more of a story, would be a great addition to the daily facts.

Following my own advice not to start a new podcast, I volunteered my idea to Derek and Swoopy of Skepticality, and they eagerly accepted.

As of this week’s episode of Skepticality, I’ve done 44 Skeptic History podcast segments. They will continue.

Whenever you want

Back in June the James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF) released an iPhone app called Today in Skeptic History. The data in it comes from me. By installing this on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch you can get a bigger daily dose, and also look things up by date whenever you want. There are around 1,300 individual dates in the app, it is the entire database that I work from when I post daily.

NEW: Weekly

Now that I’m a Research Fellow for James Randi Educational Foundation, I’ve been blogging for their site more than I did before.

We figured a little Skeptic History would be a good addition to this, so starting this week I’ll be doing a weekly post there about it. The first one is about the history of U.S. medical regulation in October.

Those of you who are loyal Skepticality listeners might notice some familiarity to these. They are based on (but not identical to) the essays I’ve been doing on that podcast. The blog draws from the material that was on the podcast one year ago, so if you keep up with both JREF SWIFT and Skepticality, you won’t be hearing duplicate information. There’s plenty of Skeptic History to go around!

Coming Soon

Coming very soon there will be yet another place you can get a little dose of Skeptic History every so often. It might not even be in electronic form. That’s all I can say, I’ll let you know when it becomes available.