A few things have cropped up over the past couple of days, related (indirectly) to the grand challenge from the last panel “discussion”:http://network.nature.com/people/rpg/blog/2008/09/15/on-science-blogging-2008—part-3 at SciBlog ’08.
Grrlscientist has a long and thoughtful essay, also published at Research Fortnight (although I can’t be arsed trying to find a link for the actual piece), about the benefits of and resistance to science weblogs. The climate scientist and founding member of RealClimate, Gavin Schmidt, argues in Nature Geoscience that weblogs are a good way of providing context that does not make it into mainstream media, or even the peer-reviewed literature. Rich Apodaca exults that his weblog is the first Google hit for ‘chemical spreadsheet’, making the point that the oxygen of online publicity can be (or might come to be) just as important for scientists as for anyone else.
That’s probably enough links for now.
Hear, hear for Grrl!! And congratulations to her on both an excellent writing style and on the publication of yet another useful article about blogging. I tried to post this as a comment directly to her but got an error message.
I especially like her practical viewpoint:
“a blog can be used to:
rapidly correct errors in mainstream media reporting
highlight the value of one’s findings while doing so
defend their research from misuse or misrepresentation”.
I am having a difficult time in raising any sort of interest in blogs in the senior researchers I frequent. Their limits on time do not admit the possibility of even reading, much less writing for, a blog. I wonder where I have found the time I now use (less than some, but clearly more than others).
Yeah, I got an error too. Perhaps it’s the death of scienceblogs.com?
no, no, scienceblogs is not at fault. it’s my fault. that piece is being published in a research magazine and i was given permission to republish it on my blog — after the magazine was published. i thought the magazine was being published on monday, but it is being published wednesday (today) instead. the piece will pop up again, legitimately, this time! sorry about that.
Excellent use of the word weblog Richard! I do not hate you.
@Grrl—the entry is still there, but just the comments are MIA, yesno?
let me know if the URI changes… ta.
Stephen: Thank you. It’s all part of the service.
The Nature Geoscience piece was published back-to-back with another Commentary by Myles Allan, putting the opposite view. They are both excellent articles and there was a fantastic and very long online discussion at realclimate.org (run by Gavin Schmidt and others) in the aftermath. As a result of which I recommended Dr Schmidt as our keynote speaker for the Science Blogging 2008 conference (see forum) but nobody else much seemed to be interested ;-(
I wrote a few posts at Peer to Peer about the Nature Geoscience commentaries and the best bits of the ensuing discussion. The latest of these is here, if anyone is interested you can track back from that post.
I’ve also posted in the Social Notworking and NN bloggers forums about David Crotty’s recent blog post for CHS Protocols about digital identity, pros and cons. Also there is a piece by Nick Anthis and other Seed Sciencebloggers in the current (?) issue of PLOS Biology. Apologies for lack of links in this comment.
Our Library doesn’t subscribe to NG, so I couldn’t read them 🙁