There is a new (nice and long) article by Laura Bonetta about science blogging in today’s issue of the journal Cell.
Bloggers on A Blog Around The Clock, Pharyngula, Aetiology, Framing Science, The Daily Transcript, Sandwalk, In the Pipeline, Nobel Intent, Useful Chemistry, De Rerum Natura and Panda’s Thumb are mentioned and/or interviewed. A couple of carnivals, e.g., Tangled Bank, Mendel’s Garden and Gene Genie are also mentioned.
For those who have no access to The Cell, I am assuming that each one of us will egotistically quote the part about oneself (like we did last month with The Scientist article), so here are the parts that are about me and then you can go around the other blogs to see their excerpts – once you put that all together you’ll have the whole article, I bet:
According to the Technorati blog search engine (http://www.technorati. com), there are about 19,881 blogs with a “science” tag. Most of these are “pseudoscience blogs, new age blogs, creationist blogs, or computer technology blogs,” says Bora Zivkovic, a Ph.D. student who writes A Blog Around the Clock (http://scienceblogs. com/clock). Zivkovic estimates that the actual number of science blogs is 1,000 to 1,200 and notes that such blogs are “written by graduate students, postdocs and young faculty, a few by undergraduates and tenured faculty, several by science teachers, and just a few by professional journalists.”
These 1,000 or so science blogs provide authoritative opinions about pressing issues in science, such as evolution or climate change, or aim to engage other scientists in open and frank discussions about the scientific literature or science policy. Because of their freewheeling nature, these blogs take scientific communication to a different level.
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The organizer of this year’s NC Science Blogging Conference, Bora Zivkovic, says the initial motivation for the conference was to “meet in person a bunch of bloggers that I talk to online.” Applications arrived from all over the world and more than 170 people attended. The next conference will be held January 19, 2008, also in Chapel Hill. This conference brings together “scientists, science bloggers, science journalists, and science educators for a day of exchanging ideas and information, says Zivkovic.
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For the uninitiated, The Open Laboratory: The Best Writing on Science Blogs 2006, for sale at Lulu.com, is a collection of 50 of the best science blog posts of 2006. “When people hear ‘blog’ they think of a personal journal with bad grammar or a highly biased angry political post,” says Zivkovic, who put together the anthology. “People
who are more comfortable with a book will see that blogs provide high quality science online.”
Jason Rosenhouse, Larry Moran, Reed Cartwright, bk (in German), Daniel Rhoads and Alex Palazzo have already chimed in with their commentary on the article.
Update: ncurse, Mike, Jean-Claude Bradley and Moheb have more.