Hi Nuffnangers! Thanks for the chance to be the featured blogger for this month! I’m Marc, and I probably spend far too much time reading and blogging about science. I’ve blogged on “The Mr Science Show” for almost the last 4 years. Come and say hi on the blog.

What is your blog’s URL and how did you choose it? www.mrscienceshow.com The blog’s name is “The Mr Science Show” and it came about quite randomly during a holiday to China at the end of 2005. My brother was working with the English service of China Radio International in Beijing, and decided to get me in to do a science interview. The CRI program hosts, not knowing what to call the segment (which was on cloning and stem cells), came up with the rather unimaginative name “The Mr Science Show” on the spot. I thought it was cute, so I decided to keep it!

I started the blog not long after the first CRI show in order to keep show notes of the things we talked about. The show continued on CRI for another year or so, with the hosts interviewing me down the phone. We stopped doing the show for CRI when I moved to England for 18 months and the time difference became too hard! But I continue to record a regular science show which I put out as a podcast on mrscienceshow.com – I write plenty of science articles and publish plenty of sciencey thoughts on the blog.

When did you first start blogging and what made you first hit the keyboard? Before I started blogging about science on mrscienceshow.com, I had a personal blog – but I figured that no one would really be interested in reading about my tooth aches, so I stopped writing it. It still exists, if anyone wants to find it…. One of the reasons I started blogging about science is that a lot of people think that all scientists wear a lab-coat, or are in other ways mad! Science sometimes has a bad reputation, so I wanted to write about how science is everywhere around us – science is sometimes serious, sometimes light-hearted, but always important, and increasingly so as the world deals with big problems like global warming. Plus, science is not very well represented in the media – I wanted to cut through the media spin.

Mr Science - the seriously lighthearted!

What is the thing you most enjoy about blogging? I can do it at work and get away with it! Well, sorta…. I have a passion for science having spent a long time at University studying it, and blogging about it lets me indulge my love of science with my love of writing and communication. Through blogging I’ve also had the chance to do other fun things such as experiment with making videos and putting them up on the blog. And I’ve interviewed some really interesting people, from world-famous scientists to comedians. And it can be a great time-waster!

What is the coolest thing your blog has helped you to do? I have met some really interesting people through the blog – it’s amazing the people who get in touch – some completely nuts, some with extraordinary theories about the world and some simply wanting to say or catch up for a beer. Another cool thing that the blog has helped me do is travel (or give me a good excuse to anyway!) Each time I travel, and I have had some great experiences over the last few years around the world, I write it up on the blog, attempting to tie it to science. Sometimes I succeed… Through the blog I managed to sell an article I wrote about Iceland, which meant I could write the trip off on tax! How good is that?! I also went to the London Science Blogging Conference – now that is cool!

What piece of advice would you give to someone just starting out their very first blog? Just do it! Having your own blog is very easy – blogger, wordpress etc pretty much do everything you need for you. Perhaps the most important thing is to have a topic that people want to read about and an interesting angle on it. And have fun with it – it’s your blog! Be opinionated too, that’s the whole point of a blog.

Tell us about your pets, friends, hobbies, star sign, shoe size… whatever! Well, I’m 30, 6 foot tall, like long walks on the beach, reading poetry… I live in Sydney, Australia and have spent the last few years trying to see the world before I get too old. I grew up in Sydney but lived for a time in London and loved it. I hope to get to South America soon – but Antarctica would be the dream! I love sport (as you can probably tell from the blog) and play cricket, swim as often as I can and spend too much time at work playing table tennis than I probably should.

What do you love about Nuffnang? Apart from the freebies they kindly sent me when I joined up?! I like the network of blogs and have already found a few blogs I like through Nuffnang. I also think its far more friendly than other ad services, and its actually built for blogs.

Visit the Amazing Mr Science Show today and see what you can learn!