Sarah Tomlin lurks in the ether

First, some confessions. I am not a blogger. I fear I would not have the stamina to blog with the frequency most bloggers achieve. Worse than that, I lurk. This is blogging jargon for people who visit blog sites to read the posts but never leave a comment themselves. I realise this is considered rude because I am not sharing in the conversation. But I don’t like to think of myself as a lurker: I’m more of a hit-and-run reader. I just don’t hang around long enough to post a comment.
So why do I read science blogs? As a journalist I am always on the lookout for news leads, and blogs are a window into academic coffee room chatter of the sort the media is not normally privy to.
But the biggest draw is finding communities with niche interests – be they bird flu, climate change, cosmology or medical ethics – that inspire not just media but also great public curiosity. And blogging is by nature a very public activity: there are now more than 70 million blogs, with new bloggers voicing their opinions every minute. Scientists who blog are a small but growing minority in this sea of online chatter.
 
Easy access

Blogging has existed in one form or another ever since Internet users built websites they could update themselves. But what made blogging an Internet phenomenon was technology that made reading and keeping up to date with such websites much easier. By using ‘syndication feeds’ (rss and so on), bloggers can deliver new content directly to their readers. And by using a ‘feed aggregator’ readers can keep track of their favourite blogs and organise their feeds in a way that makes it easy to scan them over morning coffee.
Once bloggers and their readers became connected in such an instantaneous way, the evolution of online communities, including the science blogosphere, was inevitable.

Blog categories

As a reader, I divide the existing science blogosphere into roughly five different categories.
There are single issue blogs, written by scientists who care deeply about one issue, from tracking the intelligent design debate to regular updates on bird flu. There are group blogs, written by groups of scientists with overlapping interests who share the blog duties between them. There are insider blogs written, sometimes anonymously, by scientists from inside a large organisation, whether a drugs company or a government lab. And there are event blogs tied to a specific scientific event or expedition, such as the many excellent blogs written by scientists from the British Antarctic Survey. Finally, there are blogs that exist to provide media analysis, and to debunk bad science reporting by the mainstream media.

Specific sites

Some blogs combine two or more of these features. The RealClimate blog is a group blog focusing on climate change, started with the aim of providing a quick response from climate scientists to new climate stories in the media and ‘to provide the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary’.
According to Gavin Schmidt, a NASA scientist and RealClimate blogger: ‘RealClimate fills a hunger for raw but accessible information that goes deeper than newspaper articles, but is more easily understood than the scientific literature. Magazines fill a void, but they can’t react or interact as effectively as a blog.’
The media itself is also getting into blogging, with blogs written by journal editors and science writers jostling to share the same space. 

Blogs are a window into academic coffee room chatter of the sort the media is not normally privy to

Starting off

All this can be confusing for the blogosphere newbie. If you’re unsure where to start, a good place to get a feel for the activities of science blogs is scienceblog.com. This easy-to-navigate website brings together 60 science blogs spanning social and science issues, including the popular Pharyngula blog written by Paul Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota. Myers writes frequently about the intelligent design movement and, explaining the appeal of blogging, says, ‘A blog’s more like the conversation you’d have at the bar after a scientific meeting.’
Another easy way to find blogs is to use a search engine. Both www.technorati.com/blogs and blogsearch.google.com specialise in helping you to navigate the blogging universe. And when you find a blog you enjoy reading, you can easily discover other blogs by checking out the ‘blogroll’ – this is a list of other sites the blogger says they like to read, usually a list of their blogging friends.
Still unsure about the blogosphere? My advice is to go try it for yourself. Just remember it’s okay to lurk, but you should never, never become a troll.1

1. A troll is someone who intentionally posts derogatory
or otherwise inflammatory messages about sensitive
topics to bait users into responding.

Sarah Tomlin is a News Feature and Commentary Editor for Nature.