Core Genomics is going cor-porate (sort of)

I've just had my five year anniversary of starting the Core Genomics blog! Those five years have whizzed by and NGS technologies have surpassed almost anything I dreamed would have been possible when I started using them in 2007. My blog has also grown beyond anything I dreamed possible and the feedback I've had has been a real motivating factor in keeping up with the writing. It also stimulated my move onto Twitter and I now have multiple accounts: @CIGenomics (me), @CRUKgenomecore (my lab) and @RNA_seq, @Exome_seq (PubMed Twitter bots).

The blog is still running on the Google Blogger site I set up back in 2011 and I feel ready for a change. This will allow me to do a few things I've wanted to do for a while and over the next few months I'll be migrating core-genomics to a new WordPress site: Enseqlopedia.com. 

Introducing Enseqlopedia: The new home of Core Genomics will be a chance for me to expand on something I've been doing for many years - explaining NGS to users. The same blog content is going to keep flowing, but other stuff will appear alongside, and I hope you'll find it informative and entertaining.

The Enseqlopedia name was chosen as I'll be adding content describing methods, linking to the best papers that demonstrate these or advance them, and hopefully making the new site a useful resource for the community. It will also be somewhere I can serve up more PubMed Twitterbot output in a single place outside of Twitter. I'd also like to reinvigorate the sequencer map Nick Loman and I put together many years ago. Some of the reasons for these changes has come about from my dissatisfaction with sites that serve up NGS news, but simply regurgitate press releases from academics or companies in the NGS field; I want to deliver more than this. Hopefully you already agree that my blog posts hit the spot, and I'm hoping the new stuff is of real interest to readers. I aim to make sure you can see that what appears has been carefully chosen and has an opinion behind it.

Core Genomics corp: The biggest change is going to be the appearance of  commissioned or sponsored content i.e. stuff I get paid to post. I've not tried to monetise my blog before, mainly because I don't like unsightly ads all over the place, however I've been asked to write reasonably frequently about new products in the NGS space and until now I've always turned the offers down. I have ghost written other content, but nothing on Core Genomics has been paid for - and all the topics have been chosen by me. The two new types of post will be tagged so you can tell immediately what your reading:

Commissioned posts will be tagged "commissioned content" and labelled at the top of the post so you know who paid me to write the piece. All commissioned content will be taken on with full editorial control i.e. I decide what ends up in the final piece, and I will have written the post.

Sponsored posts will be tagged "sponsored content" and labelled at the top of the post so you know who wrote the piece. Sponsored content will only be accepted by me if I think readers of Core Genomics would be interested. The content is likely to be written by the sponsor and should be considered as an advert. Although I will decide whether a sponsorship opportunity will get posted I will NOT have full editorial control i.e. I get to decide on what sponsored content appears on the site, but I will not have written the post.

My first sponsored piece will be coming soon. Although the topic has been chosen by someone else, the opinions are very much my own. I'm not expecting to write much more than one sponsored post a month (so any NGS companies reading this better get their requests in soon), and I'm not going to write about something I really don't believe in. 

I'll also be making it clearer what kind of consultancy work I'm happy to take on. Mostly this has been technological consulting for investors who want to understand market reactions to new instruments or developments (with Brexit came a rush of consultancy work). But I've also consulted for technology companies, and for research groups.

Thanks for reading Core Genomics - hopefully you'll be reading for another five years!

James.