I’m excited to be part of an excellent panel at this year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Organized by feminist-scientist dynamo Patricia B. Campbell, the panel is called Blogs, Boards and Bonding: Using Electronic Communities to Support Women in Science. I’ll be joining several other distinguished panelists, and talking about my experiences trying to squash gender stereotypes in the world of science writing, as well as how blogging has helped female scientists find community and get their work noticed in unconventional ways.

Despite my furious posting on io9, I am continuing to write my weekly column Techsploitation. It’s nice to have a place where I can still be an angry leftist when it comes to science and tech, and these days there’s more than ever to be pissed about. Here’s what the radical, destroy-the-current-hegemony part of my brain has been doing for the past several weeks.

I thought a lot about consumer biotech. I worry that companies such as 23andme.com, which offers to sequence your genome for $1000 and tell you things about yourself based on your genes, will become the basis for new social networks based on genome-compatibility. Think of it as user-generated eugenics. Then I scoffed at people’s concerns over eating cloned meat, and talked about how cloning livestock for meat isn’t the real problem. Factory farming is.

I told you about how Comcast has a subtle but nefarious plan to stop file-sharing by occasionally stopping data packets that it believes are from file-sharing programs. And I screamed and yelled and stomped my feet about the government’s nonsubtle, utterly evil plan to grant telcos immunity for having handed over their customers’ personal data to the NSA without warrants.

Now that I am editing and writing a mainstream blog, I worry a lot about what will happen to this once-upstart medium as it merges with more traditional media. I wrote about my concerns that blogs will lose their edge and make the same mistakes that mainstream magazines and newspapers did when they started self-censoring and narrowing the range of what it’s permissible to talk about in a public forum.

And just last week, I wrote about the mysterious severing of 5 undersea fiber optic cables, which cut off network service to many countries in Asia and the Middle East.

I’m finally catching my breath after doing nothing but blog at io9 for about 5 weeks straight. In between posting, I also managed to organize a conference for Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility called Technology in Wartime. It was held at Stanford (thanks to the Center for Internet and Society!) on January 26, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out. We had a full audience, despite the early start hour on a Saturday, and the speakers — including luminaries Bruce Schneier, Cindy Cohn, Ronald Arkin, Herb Lin, Kevin Poulsen, Barbara Simons, Patrick Ball, Noah Shachtman, and Nick Mathewson — were terrific.

Thanks to videographer Mark Burdett, the proceedings are now archived in video form on Archive.org. You can see a complete list of panels/speakers, with links to video, here. Thanks to everybody who came out, and to the board of CPSR for helping make this such a great conference on a timely topic.