blogging

I'm announcing today the new availability of a bibliography section here on the weblog. At present this database includes more than 11,500 entries. These represent a large fraction of the historical and contemporary literature in human evolution.

The database as it exists today owes to the work of many, many people. Foremost among these is Milford Wolpoff, who compiled and has curated an immense bibliography as a flat text file over many years. It includes entries that have been cited in many papers by Milford, his students, and many coauthors.

Milford says that these folks are too numerous to remember. That has the ring of truth. Just by looking through the entries you get a picture of an active group of people over more than forty years.

To these "legacy" references, I have begun to add fuller bibliographic information during the last few years. This began with Digital Object Identifier (DOI) tags for new, and later for older entries. In the last few months, I have begun to archive further information, including abstract.

I continue to update and backfill references that belong in the database. There are many cited here on the blog that haven't been properly archived, and I will be adding these along with new citations.

What you'll find

The bibliography has a search filter, search terms will match author, keyword, title or abstract (where present). With more than 11,000 entries, you want to be a little selective about how you search. Author names work really well, and yield a list separated by year of publication.

You'll find each reference preceded by a unique citation key in brackets. I did this purely for my own convenience, but for those who may want to download lists of citations, it may also prove useful.

A list of search results can be exported to BibTeX or RTF format for download.

There is also a "filter" tab that allows keyword, author, and year filtering of the list. This is really not very useful; the size of the database makes it much simpler to search than to filter all entries. I have entered keywords for only very recent entries, so keyword filtering is not especially helpful.

Each citation in the reference list comes accompanied by several links. You can click on the title, taking you to a reference page with full bibliographic information. For recent entries, the reference page includes DOI, direct links to journals, and the abstract. For all entries, the links include Google Scholar lookups and citation downloads (in BibTeX or RTF format). Author links give a list of all my database entries from that author. These require exact name matching, so don't rely too much on them -- a search of the database for an author's last name is usually more complete.

My bibliography section has its own feed, which lists new entries in reverse chronological order. I tend to upload new references in batches, so you'll frequently see a dozen or so show up at a time. I've put a short excerpt of the feed in a block on the left side of every page, just above my blogroll.

Snafus

On the topic of author names: I know that many of you will immediately search for your own name. You'll find some of your publications there, but you almost certainly will see that many are missing. A few of you may not find a single paper!

Please don't be offended. Remember that the entire list was typed by somebody. If a paper isn't there, it's because nobody typed it into the list. Really, only a few of mine are in there!

I'm not volunteering to add another 11,000 entries to the list right away. It will take me 5 years or so to manage that, at the current rate. But if you find yourself wanting to pitch in, to help add some of your references to the database, then let me know and I'll work with you.

There are countless typos. I do not intend to fix these, unless I cite the paper moving forward. It would literally take me weeks of work to fix the typos in these entries. Please don't contact me to fix these, because I won't do it!

Some errors in the database have resulted from a script gone wrong. I scripted them all into BibTeX. When I did this, my script langage was Pascal, which was no picnic. That's a lot of pattern matching on citations. To the credit of all the people who entered data, the overwhelming majority of citations fell into a few common patterns. But there were oddballs, which didn't get translated properly. Over the years I've fixed many of these script-induced errors, but not all. Some of these are ugly and weird. I'm sorry!

A few quirks come from the software that presents the database. I haven't begun hacking on this, and I've decided to leave the defaults for awhile to see how well they handle the requirements.

Most critically -- inline links to the references get mixed up when there are more than one reference list on the page. Since this is usually true of my front page, that's a problem! This is a minor annoyance, since the inline links only save a bit of scrolling, but it may not be easy to fix.

Google Scholar lookups work pretty well, but I've run into some issues. For some older entries, the links fail to find papers that Google actually knows about. The problem is that the system passes the full title on to Google as a "quote", requiring an exact match. These often fail. Removing the quotes from these will often recover the citation in Google Scholar.

If you do a search, the biblio page will continue to filter on your search phrase until you reset it. There's always a "reset search" link right up at the top of the page.

Keyword searching works quite well with recent entries to the database, but not with the legacy references. If you are working on a research paper and want to do a lot of keyword searches, you'll be much better off starting with Google Scholar or Web of Science.

The inner workings

I got to talking with some researchers from Microsoft a few months ago, who were interested in the ways that I curate information. During our conversation, I came to realize that maintaining bibliographic data is the worst bottleneck in my work.

I use BibTeX in my research work, but I've never had a good workflow that would encompass both research articles and blog posts under the same bibliography system. Often, I'd blog about a paper but fail to get it into my research database. If I wanted to blog about a historical paper, I'd have to go looking for it in my bibliography.

Once I talked this through, I saw what I needed to do. I had to find a better way.

Drupal has really significantly added to its bibliographic capabilities in the last couple of years. I found that the Biblio module now has almost everything I need to import and share references. With this module, Drupal can provide inline citations for blog posts and automatically compile formatted bibliographies. It also provides all those cool links to Google Scholar and other online sources.

One more sed script to replace some macros, and I had all my BibTeX database ready to upload.

But that didn't solve my problems with data input. I found that CiteULike could take on this task pretty well. The site automatically scrapes bibliography information from the websites of journals. Increasingly, everything with a Digital Object Identifier link has some way for CiteULike to get its information --- even many edited volumes.

I've tried CiteULike and many other bibliographic tools in the past. I know that other folks like Zotero, or Papers, or Mendeley, or RefWorks, or CiteSeerX. I've tried them all -- every few months I've given them another look to see if they've reached that critical point where they're useful. I never had much luck. There was always some snag keeping me from getting back value for the effort I put in.

I can't say whether CiteULike is the best of them today, but it did what I needed done -- crucially, accurate BibTeX import of my whole reference file, including citation keys, easy setting citation keys for new references, and bulk export so I can update both my local file and Drupal without extra typing. Plus, the recommendation list is really useful.

Final thoughts

Most of the database is also available under my CiteULike profile, so if you're a user of that service, you may find that useful. It's more searchable in some respects, less so in others. CiteULike also offers a feed of my new entries, which run with abstracts. It's like a whole abstracts blog!

Meanwhile, I'll be filling in references very quickly for the next few months. It remains a work in progress, especially as I continue to merge blog citations with the database. If you find it useful, please drop me a note so I'll know how you're using it!

I'm just back from the physical anthropology meetings. What a lot of interesting things there were -- a few in the sessions, and many outside of them!

A few people asked me what I saw or heard that I would be writing up for the blog. I had to explain that a long time ago I decided not to blog about stuff I saw at conferences. It makes life easier in several ways -- I don't have to sit around taking notes, and people don't have to worry what they tell me.

Naturally, there are exceptions to every rule. Sometimes people have already published their stuff, or they're hoping to publicize work that won't be appearing in "embargo" journals. And sometimes there's stuff that isn't science, at least not directly, but deserves a record of some kind.

About these meetings, I want to write one thing -- these were outstanding for sharing casts of new things with the field at large. Darryl de Ruiter brought casts of many of the Malapa specimens, and made many opportunities to share them with everybody interested. Scott Simpson had brought a cast of his new reconstruction of the pelvis of the Nariokotome skeleton, and was showing it along with his poster about it.

For readers who don't usually study anatomy, I have to emphasize just how important it is to be able to look at a physical object. Descriptions and photos are, of course, necessary for publication, and they give a formalized account of anatomy. But the sheer size and three-dimensional appearance of a physical object carries tremendous information, not easily conveyed in words. I have worked with bone and fossils for many years, so that handling a cast allows me to place it next to thousands of objects in my tactile mental catalog. I have a much better understanding of those fossils now that I've gotten a chance to handle the casts, and that memory will stay with me.

I haven't seen such an availability of new casts at the meetings since 2001, when Maeve Leakey had casts of Kenyanthropus.

So I want to recognize how open and accessible those objects were at these meetings. These guys are real class acts, and their willingness to share and talk about the new fossils will advance the science. The quality of the reviews for their upcoming research papers will certainly be higher, since many of the potential reviewers will have a much greater familiarity with the fossils. Besides that, the mere opportunity to look at things along with a wide range of experts is really unique. I congratulate them.

I had a surprise this weekend. After years of declining value through increasing noise, I'd essentially stopped checking my Technorati stats. What had degraded almost beyond usefulness took a leap into unrecognizable territory last year, as the team started revamping its software. Yet, it now seems that the tinkering has worked: Technorati got its mojo back.

Back in the early days of blogging, all the kool kids "claimed" their blogs on Technorati. In those days, pre-2005, there was no Google Blogsearch. Not everybody had a feed yet, and the diversity of blog software was very uneven in its support for feeds, trackbacks, and blogrolling.

Topical "communities" grew mostly by the blogrolls of well-trafficked sites -- those who knew the ropes led by example, others picked up the techniques as they read. A few commercial ventures started to promote the idea of shared hosting for blogs with similar interests -- leading to the birth of the "science blog" concept, both in the trademarked and more ecumenical versions. In the blogoverse, one ruling credo came to the fore: It wasn't how many readers you had, it was how many inbound links. Links gave an air of reciprocity to the entire enterprise -- you read other people, linked to what you liked, and thereby shared their work with others. Link-love was born.

Technorati did two things well. Most important, the site provided a report of inbound links. For those (like me) who never did get trackbacks to work right, having a third-party site provide link data was the best way to find new blogs, return links to them, add them to the blogroll, and build the community. I checked the site every day, to find the conversations that my posts started elsewhere.

But Technorati's more visible accomplishment was its blog ranking. One numbered list, from one to twenty-four million, listing every blog in order of inbound links. In the early days, the list was almost aristocratic. Latecomers like me could aspire to get the number of links of more established blogs, but it wasn't too easy to climb the charts because they tracked the total number of links, not the number in the last few months. It took an interesting writer to climb the chart. Technorati wasn't the only ranking or link-tracker -- N. Z. Bear's "Ecosystem" memorably gave a cute name to everyone in its tiers of blog ranks, and other upstart rankings would appear over the next several years.

In 2006, mainstream science started to take notice of blogs. Nature ran a news story about the phenomenon, listing 50 "top" science blogs, taken straight from the Technorati rankings at the time. My position on the list, at number 14, proved to be a great advantage as I tried to explain to skeptical colleagues what the heck I was doing. It's one thing for Technorati to say you're number 14 at something, but when Nature agrees -- well, that's scientific. It made a difference.

But in many ways, that was the high water mark of the independent ranking and link-counting engine. The growth of blog "communities" gave new ways to game the system. Repeated blogrolls and aggregators guaranteed some blogs a link count vastly out of kilter with the conversation that they actually provoked. "Link trading" among completely unrelated blogs further distorted the picture. Over time, Technorati started to degrade. The worst of the problem came from spam blogs. As the spambots ruthlessly interlinked with each other, they climbed the rankings and pushed the real blogs down the list. By 2008, most of my inbound links turned out to be either spam comments (not me, I swear!) or automated blogrolls from sites that have nothing to do with science. With all this static, somebody badly needed to adjust the rabbit ears.

New aggregation services, like Postgenomic, Wikio, and others, tried to create topical lists for science. I tried many of them over the years, but each fell short -- either leaving out big chunks of the conversation, or failing to fix problems with incoming feeds. I'm running stock Drupal, but for some reason many third-party sites can't index my feed and won't give me any service to figure out why. Does anybody care? Heck no -- the point of these sites is either to test algorithms or to place advertisements. Technorati was just as mercenary as any of the others, but at least they got it right -- even when I was running Bloxsom with RSS 0.85 cobbled in Perl. But this same accessibility may have made the site's Achilles heel: spambots were pinging ten times as much as the real blogs.

Last year I'd almost given up on finding incoming links. Google gives me a daily digest, but their indexing misses a surprising number of people, even those with well-established sites who write every day. I would sometimes discover that somebody had linked to me weeks before. Often I'd write, or go and put up a comment -- but after days the opportunity for conversation may already have passed by.

There were signs that other people had the same problem. Blogs no longer seemed the conversational tools they once had been -- people were taking true conversations onto Twitter. The social web started to draw people into backchannel conversations, inaccessible to ordinary readers. Fewer and fewer of the established science blogs seemed to explain things from the beginning. For those of us who may not want to "follow" or "friend" each other all the time, the web started to seem like a lonely place. Was there still room for a real correspondence, with revision and thought over time, instead of jotted into 140 characters?

Seeing the last few days of incoming links, all in one place, makes me feel a lot better. It was just chance -- really, looking for some blog coverage of how Sketchbook Pro works on the new iPad -- and there they all were. My inbound links! No spamblogs, no endless list of blogroll links. Now I'm back to discovering new blogs, from people who are engaging with my field. Old friends may have gone over the last few years, or have cut back their online writing as they moved from graduate school into industry or the tenure track. But new ones are rising to take their place. The aristocratic element of the ranking has relaxed -- the new Technorati algorithm is ignoring blogrolls and is instead reading feeds for new links. That gives it an immediate quality, and a blog's rank will ebb and flow with the conversation it provokes.

After all this time, I'm still in the top 14 for science.

I read Chris Anderson's book because it was, well, "Free". The book's thesis is simple: Sometimes people profit by giving things away.

I have been, for several years now, making scientific knowledge available for no cost to any readers who care to come by my site. In academic circles, this practice is ordinarily considered to be insane. Therefore, whenever I come across anything explaining why blogging isn't such a stupid idea, I put it right into my files. That's for Luddites on future promotion committees.

How do I review the book without making points like a Slashdot comment thread?

Somewhere in the book, Anderson wrote his plan for making money from Free: Get businesses to pay for the Chris Anderson "Free" seminar. The short business profiles and catchy anecdotes in the book were pretty well crafted as advertisements for the seminar. But beneath the chrome, there are some interesting -- sometimes wacky -- ideas about the nature of human economic interactions.

Nature's editorial, "How to stop blogging" (which might sound like a self-help piece), takes a position on the conference blogging issue:

We are in the midst of a clash of conference-going cultures. Attendees who have taken to blogs and other social-media applications such as Twitter and Friend Feed will value the instantaneous communication of fact, conjecture and commentary as a way to network beyond badge-holders. Most researchers, in contrast, will focus on the science and ways to network with fellow attendees. If they are aware of social-networking applications, they are likely to regard them as distractions at best. At worst, they will fear them as tools to undermine and scoop, to release data not ready for consumption by anyone other than the trusted colleagues who bothered to make it to their talk or walk up to their poster and start asking questions.

Conference organizers are stuck in the middle. They want to let the world know that their meetings are worthwhile, and yet they also want to attract speakers presenting the newest and most cutting-edge findings. So how to protect speakers from having sensitive, unfinished or 'scoopable' work broadcast to the world?

There is a problem of attribution worth considering. Suppose some young blood watching a presentation has a great idea. Maybe it's an idea the presenter has already thought about, maybe not. Now, she blogs it. Now anyone can see how great (or obvious, or terrible) the idea is, and how it applies to the topic of the presentation. What are the presenter's obligations? As she prepares the publication, does she need to cite the blogger? Does she need to invite the blogger as a coauthor? Will reviewers know about the blogger's idea and demand that the manuscript be altered?

If we're going to open science conferences, we have to think about the meaning of authorship. Comment systems on scientific papers may help address the issue, by giving more opportunities for sharing ideas. But in the worst cases, a topic may draw such broad interest -- and at the bottom be seemingly so simple -- as to create a tangled mess of irresolvable ideas. Imagine crowdsourcing the hobbits....

No, I'm not doing that right now. Elizabeth Pennisi reports that some science writers are miffed about bloggers at scientific conferences:

In addition to reporting on genetic variation in a gene that is active in fast muscle fibers at The Biology of Genomes meeting, ["Genetic Future blogger Daniel] MacArthur wrote several on the spot blog posts covering advances discussed by the participants. Francis Collins also mentioned results on his new Web site.

A specialized Web-based news service, Genomeweb, complained. To attend CSHL meetings, reporters agree to obtain permission from a speaker before writing up any results. But MacArthur didn’t have to click that box when he registered and was free to report without getting any go-ahead. Several other participants were twittering, says CSHL meetings organizer David Stewart. “They weren’t held to the same standards” as the media, says Stewart.

CSHL is Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which puts on a roughly weekly series of conferences during the spring and fall on topics in biology. Organizers invite a relatively small number of researchers to present a plenary program, and a larger number of researchers and students pay fairly high fees to attend. It's a nice place, and although the fees run high, they're comparable to other conferences if you include the cost of the usual meeting hotel (since CSHL provides housing). But you can understand that a writer might want to be sure to get leads or background on several stories.

A non-attendee who followed blogs could pretty easily figure out several interesting stories and then make phone calls to the authors. It's not the same as networking in person, and it doesn't give the kind of context that conference attendance can give. But it's lot cheaper.

Dan MacArthur has posted his own reactions.

It's worth mentioning here that most of the dangers of live-blogging are (in my mind at least) generally over-stated. For instance, the risk of being scooped due to data posted on the web seems rather far-fetched given that most of the potential scoopers are already sitting in the audience watching the presentation. There is a fear that live-blogging distracts people from watching the seminar; I would argue in response that - given the number of people I see programming or working on their grant submission in genomics meetings - we should be grateful that live-bloggers are actually engaging directly with the material being presented.

An interesting conversation has emerged in MacArthur's comment section, and another at 2020 Science. Some commenters argue for openness at all costs, others that blogging a conference presentation is bad, bad, bad. And then there's the topic of tweeting. I'd be more likely to report conferences in haiku than on Twitter.

What do I think? Well, I often take notes at meetings, but rarely blog about the talks. That's not a hard policy, it's just the way my writing style works out for me. I hardly ever uncritically repeat what somebody may have said or written, I tell you what I think about it. Sure, sometimes my thoughts don't add much value, and sometimes it's my own misunderstandings that come out. But generally I want to explore why something looks wrong, or the assumptions that somebody missed. If I'm going to seriously engage with somebody's ideas, I need more to work with than a conference talk. It's too easy to make simple mistakes in a talk that you'd easily catch in a manuscript, and too hard to judge from a talk which mistakes are easily fixed and which may be fatal.

There are some posters and talks at every meeting that deserve more attention -- they tell a story that might not strike the casual observer as newsworthy, but that have real potential if told in the right way. Is it doing the authors a favor to blog about them? I can think of several better favors. Buttonhole a science writer and tell her why it's a story. Offer to interview the authors instead of just twittering their results. Always ask first before writing anything. How do you know that somebody who just saw the poster before you didn't tell the authors about some egregious error?

Over the last few years, I've noticed public meetings getting more and more scripted and boring. What a drag. There are lots of reasons for this, and blogging is not even close to the top of the list. But blogging and twittering and cell phone cameras are part of the technological changes that have helped to dull things. When you go to a talk that shows slides only in 50 millisecond increments, you know they're thinking about camera phones and bloggers taking notes. It's hard enough to keep from seeming like a jerk; technology doesn't seem to make it any easier.

Nature (open access) discusses the decline of science journalism and the rise of blogs. The article profiles John Timmer, whose stuff at Nobel Intent I read almost every day. You can tell Nature doesn't really get blogs yet, because they don't provide a link!

There are two separate stories here, the decline of journalism (including science) and the rise of blogging. I'm not so sure they're related. I'll tell you some of my thoughts, informed by a lot of blogging and a little bit of work in the media.

The decline of science journalism is fairly straightforward:

Science journalism boomed in the 1980s and early 1990s. In the United States — where by 1989 some 95 newspapers had dedicated science sections — and elsewhere, the field's precipitous rise was supported by buoyant profits in the media sector. "The model of a major paper was that they did really serious science coverage," says Deborah Blum, who won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting in the Sacramento Bee on the use of animals in research, and who now teaches at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. But there was a problem with the science sections, she says. "They didn't make money."

Most papers were willing to support their sections, even at a loss, because science was the thing to have. Today, in a harsher mass-media landscape, that has changed.

It's tough to be a journalist, period, these days. Papers are shutting down all over the country. You don't see papers taking on the long investigative series nearly so much as they used to do. A lot of the life has gone out of political and sports reporting, and that's both because the people are different than they used to be, and because there are more demands on them.

If you think about it, most journalism is really an impossible task. You're writing stories about things that some of your readers know in great detail -- like the player stats of the local football team -- and other readers have never heard about. If you cater too much to one crowd, you'll lose the other. And that's for topics that are inherently interesting to people, who care why the team won or lost the game.

Now, if you take the average scientific topic, it takes five paragraphs just to explain why anybody should be interested. Writing an interesting newspaper-length article about science is hard. I know because I've done a few.

A writer with great dedication and love for the subject can do the hard job, if she has time to devote to it. A few have the kind of science training that lets them accomplish the near-miracle of making science understandable and interesting, and they gravitate to the few outlets that can still support good science writing economically. A few scientists have the magical ability to write non-clunky prose, and they do some public writing as a sideline. Almost all of these people either write books or have the ambition of doing so, which tells you something about the disadvantages of the magazine or newspaper-length format.

Now what about blogging? There we certainly have lots of people interested in writing about science, and some have the ability to do it well. But if we're going to compare the entire blogosphere with the NY Times, in terms of how much is worth reading for the average non-professional interested in science, the blogosphere is worse by an order of magnitude.

There is one essential ingredient that blogs do well -- probably better than any other format. They have something new. That's the basic recipe of the news: there's always something different to read. That's what makes a blog a much better way to promote your research than a static lab website. No matter how flashy or multimedia your site is, once somebody has seen it, she doesn't need to come back and see it again.

The combination of "always something new," "unpaid" and "no editor" doesn't work out all that often. A news site with a blog format, a little money and an editor, like Timmer's, has a good chance at developing a wide readership. It helps to be associated with a larger website already known for its tech reporting. There's some interesting documentary and multimedia work being done behind paywalls, like those associated with some college textbooks, but these largely defeat the purpose of accessibility. Plus, most of these sites are updated very irregularly, if at all.

Oh, there's lots on the blogs for people who already follow science closely. They're the equivalent of sports fans who know all the player stats. That's certainly been my attitude about writing; I try to make things understandable for my future self if I'm reading my stuff two years from now and have forgotten what I'm writing about.

There's a lot of garbage on the blogs, too. It's sort of like your box scores are interspersed with advertisements for somebody's cat, in the middle of political ad season in a swing state. Yuck.

If we look beyond blogs -- which are really just a particular kind of website -- to other websites not connected with print publications, what do we find lacking?

1. The big advantage of the web is that it makes it trivial to include photography, color illustrations, and graphic design with a text. In print publications, there are entire branches of people working on these aspects of design. What do we see on blogs, or other science-related websites?

2. Networks -- a second big advantage of the web is hypertext. What do we see interesting there, other than linking to sites for quotes and reactions? Some networks have sprung up, like the Scienceblogs network, but the net effect has been to suck the life out of their graphic individuality. Sameness has some advantages, but if you want everything to look the same you can always use the feed.

3. Multimedia -- from broadcast networks, we see some multimedia material in science. And there have been starts, like Science TV. I like to point people to the IHO's site, Becoming Human, as a real standout. It's good multimedia. But so far, the web has not done very well providing compelling and novel science content in these formats.

4. Interviews. Reporters interview people and find out their views. What we tend to get on websites is a monologue. The multimedia and hyperlinking capabilities of the web are perfect for including a rich documentary interview experience.

5. Editors help to make things understandable to nonspecialists. Some writers are good at self-editing, but even a great writer benefits from edits. Like multimedia collation and reporting, good editing happens behind the scenes. Few websites have a strong editor. That's great for vanity projects, but not so great for public understanding.

6. Accessibility. This is the missing element in many online ventures. What to do about people who can't read your text, or who can't see your graphics or hear your podcast? One advantage of the usual bland blog format is that it's probably compatible with text readers. A flashy multimedia presentation is likely to cause accessibility problems. If you want to create something useful in education, it has to be accessible. I have some experience with this -- the cost of good transcription is one of the things holding me back from podcasting interviews.

So are blogs going to evolve into the next step in science journalism? I doubt it. Blogs make one thing easy, but the other things that contribute to effective public communication are still hard. Look at me -- I could use an editor just to find a way to finish this post!

UPDATE(2009-03-28):

Carl Zimmer comments at length on the subject, also pointing to an article in the Columbia Journalism Review by Curtis Brainerd.

I'm writing this post live from the Kaleidoscope program here at UW. My part of today's program is a workshop on sharing your work with the world, using blogs and other online tools.

For participants (or others), I thought I would provide a couple of links. I wrote about blogging and tenure here last year, a post that I followed up with a second part, but I haven't yet finished the series.

An earlier post also pointed to a 2005 article in Slate on the topic, along with some other articles.

This week's Nature has a surprising editorial about the value of scientific blogging:

[R]esearchers would do well to blog more than they do. The experience of journals such as Cell and PLoS ONE, which allow people to comment on papers online, suggests that researchers are very reluctant to engage in such forums. But the blogosphere tends to be less inhibited, and technical discussions there seem likely to increase.

Moreover, there are societal debates that have much to gain from the uncensored voices of researchers. A good blogging website consumes much of the spare time of the one or several fully committed scientists that write and moderate it. But it can make a difference to the quality and integrity of public discussion.

That's not the surprising part. Nature was one of the earliest publishers to recognize the value of science blogs, putting out a story and ranking of top blogs nearly three years ago.

The surprising part is the editorial's focus, which is on the role of blogging within the embargo system.

I think that one of the most worthwhile purposes for blogging is to throw out new ideas for comment. Personally, I find that the airing that blogs give to research is a valuable addition to peer review. I won't say that blogs are superior to the peer review system, but I can say that many blog reactions to my work have been superior critiques to any peer review I got on the same papers.

It seems obvious that blogging about research results is not the same as publishing them in a journal. But if you attract too much attention for unpublished results, your work will be old news. Some journals actually like that -- papers that have the benefit of lots of pre-press attention and critique are going to be superior papers. But a few of the highest-profile journals thrive on secrecy -- their articles are selected to attract attention, which is maximized when it strikes suddenly.

At the same time, however, our cardinal rule has always been to promote scientific communication. We have therefore never sought to prevent scientists from presenting their work at conferences, or from depositing first drafts of submitted papers on preprint servers. So if Nature journalists or those from any other publication should hear results presented at a meeting, or find them on a preprint server, the findings are fair game for coverage — even if that coverage is ahead of the paper's publication. This is not considered a breaking of Nature's embargo. Nor is it a violation if scientists respond to journalists' queries in ensuring that the facts are correct — so long as they don't actively promote media coverage.

The blogosphere differs from mass media and specialized media in many respects, but the same considerations apply in disseminating new scientific results there. Authors of papers in press have the right to correct misrepresentations and to point to results that will appear in a paper. But a full discussion should await the paper's publication.

Well, I think that's a positive attitude. Science is better when it is more in the open. Plus, the communication of science is better when it's in the open. I think the embargo system is a problem for science. Embargoes help to manage the news around large announcements. But over many weeks, this constant drumbeat of press releases deadens the senses. Covering the "new" is understandable in the news business. But in science, "new" things are usually small tweaks on old stories.

(via Genetic Future)

Andrew Sullivan reflects in an essay in this month's Atlantic about how blogging has evolved for him. I don't usually read Sullivan, but this is well put together:

These friends, moreover, are an integral part of the blog itself—sources of solace, company, provocation, hurt, and correction. If I were to do an inventory of the material that appears on my blog, I’d estimate that a good third of it is reader-­generated, and a good third of my time is spent absorbing readers’ views, comments, and tips. Readers tell me of breaking stories, new perspectives, and counterarguments to prevailing assumptions. And this is what blogging, in turn, does to reporting. The traditional method involves a journalist searching for key sources, nurturing them, and sequestering them from his rivals. A blogger splashes gamely into a subject and dares the sources to come to him.

...

Fellow bloggers are always expanding this knowledge base. Eight years ago, the blogosphere felt like a handful of individual cranks fighting with one another. Today, it feels like a universe of cranks, with vast, pulsating readerships, fighting with one another. To the neophyte reader, or blogger, it can seem overwhelming. But there is a connection between the intimacy of the early years and the industry it has become today. And the connection is human individuality.

Sullivan's perspective is as a journalist-turned-online writer. On a related topic, I can point you to an essay by Warren Bonesteel, titled "Social Singularity":

We're already witnessing the decline of unquestioned (and almost) religious respect for those who have lengthy CV's, high social status and other traditional credentials. We're also seeing a rise in creativity and in the sharing of ideas. There are even now growing trends in multi-disciplinary approaches to problem solving, no matter the venue or discipline. There also appears to be a growing trend towards Open Source works in nearly every discipline, particularly among those who wish to make the world a better place to live. Most of mankind's traditional institutions are so far behind the curve on these issues that they will never see it coming.

Both essays reflect the optimism of the medium, possibly much too much so. But I'm reminded of a well-known twist on an Arthur C. Clarke quote: "When a scientist says something is possible, he is probably underestimating how long it will take. But when a scientist says something is impossible, he is probably wrong."