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Hi there, I'm Serendip's *other* co-founder, Bryn Mawr alum (English major!) and webmaster. Just had to throw my $.02 into the discussion here, since Serendip is many things and many styles. To cite two examples, the most popular webpapers on Serendip are HOW DOES MARIJUANA AFFECT THE BRAIN? (1000+ comments) and Sleep Paralysis (900 comments). While the papers (blogs?) address academic topics, they are written in the styles of the author-students (now alums) which are significantly different from Paul Grobstein's "voice." The readership of these papers clearly incorporates a wide spectrum of educational backgrounds as well as all of the identity categories we could name. If you take a closer look, you'll see that some of our readership is middle school aged.

Serendip was founded in 1994 before blogs existed, and we made early attempts to incorporate reader comments to the area below the webpapers on the page. We switched over to a content managed system several years ago, and now can realize some of the interactive potential that blogs promise. If you're intrigued by what makes a posting appeal to the general population (or a segment of the population), you can take a look at Serendip Readers Write Back, where the comprehensive listing of webpapers includes the number of comments on each. You can enter a number (eg 100) in the box to filter the papers to the most popular ones.

Thanks for *your* contribution to this big experiment. We welcome about 4 million visitors per year, and serve 30,000 pages of unique content.