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The rise of the bloggers

01 Feb 2006 Matin Durrani

A new breed of physicist is encouraging a broader discussion of science

In what today sounds like an impossibly quaint procedure – but one that was commonplace until quite recently – scientists who wanted a copy of a paper from a colleague at another institution used to send a request by postcard. It was a ridiculously slow process, which now takes seconds by e-mail or via the Web. But a new breed of physicists is starting to do much more with the Internet by writing their own Web logs, or blogs (see “Blogs add a new dimension to physics”). Part diary, part discussion board, part auto-rant, most physics blogs are fun, going under witty names like The Quantum Pontiff and the Three-Toed Sloth.

It would be easy to dismiss blogs as glorified diaries written by egocentric self-publicists, but they often provide surprisingly in-depth discussions of anything from complexity to quantum mechanics. Anyone can respond to entries, which does wonders for the free and open discussion of science. But as with anything that you find on the Web, there is no guarantee that blogs are a reliable source of information.

Blogs can also have a more serious side. For example, a blog set up by a computer scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in the US exposed a litany of complaints about conditions at the lab that may have contributed to the eventual resignation last year of its director Peter Nanos.

Not surprisingly, commercial publishers are eyeing up their potential. Seed magazine in the US, for example, has set up a blogging website that it claims is “the Web’s largest conversation about science”. Other publishers are likely to get in on the act, extending their own magazine and journal websites into broader discussion forums known as “community websites”. Although peer-reviewed papers should remain the principal way that scientists communicate their results to one another, blogs can serve as a useful way of expanding that communication. Get blogging!

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