Science blogging. A couple years ago, I could never have imagined I'd try it, let alone share a site here at Sb. It's definitely changed the trajectory of my interests and pursuits, and it's an evolving medium that's proven extremely influential in some circles. John Wilkins recently had a paper in Trends in Ecology and Evolution analyzing how blogs function and now our sciblings Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara Smith have an article in PLoS Biology proposing:
a roadmap for turning blogs into institutional educational tools and present examples of successful collaborations that can serve as a model for such efforts. We offer suggestions for improving upon the traditionally used blog platform to make it more palatable to institutional hosts and more trustworthy to readers; creating mechanisms for institutions to provide appropriate (but not stifling) oversight to blogs and to facilitate high-quality interactions between blogs, institutions, and readers; and incorporating blogs into meta-conversations within and between institutions.
Head over to Drug Monkey's place for a good analysis.
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You have to decide who you want to participate.
One of the great things for me, as a non-scientist, is to be able to participate in the conversations that are not too specialized. If you wanted Sb to help engage non scientists who are interested in science from a layman's perspective, and who support the growth of science in society, then in my case you have succeeded.
The (potential) downside of this is that my posts will probably not add to your professional knowledge, since I don't have professional level knowledge or skill in the sciences. At worst, people like me may get off-topic at times, or fail to see something obvious to all the academics.
You can, of course, set up different types of forums, and limit some of them to professional level discussions only, in order to facilitate your work.
But I think the outreach aspect of Sb is very important, so you guys will want the more open public forums to be a mainstay on Sb.
That's my two cents.
Blogs serve the role of conference conversations and networking. When you network at conferences, you get a good feel of what is hot and what is not. You see who the leaders are in certain research areas, and get a chance to talk to them. You get opinions on quality of research and future directions. And you get real-time feedback and sanity checks on conjectures and claims.
In the past, to do this, you either had to pay the money to go the conference (and wait until conference time rolled around), or you sent a letter to the editor (which was also slow, and there was no guarantee the right people read it). Blogs provide a low-cost real-time alternative to conference networking.
But blogs are not electronic journals. Indeed, I believe that peer-review and blogs are somewhat incompatible. Blogs are meant to informal and off-the-cuff. That is a lot of their value, and much of what would be destroyed in a peer-review filter. If you want electronic journals, fine. Those are good too. But do not confuse them with blogs.
When I see "more palatable to institutional hosts" I cannot help but think this is code for "counts towards tenure". And having sat on committees that talked about this, I know this is doomed to failure. Blogs are a great tool and can indirectly help with tenure -- they publicize your research and make you known in the community for those all important evaluation letters. But for the foreseeable future I guarantee you that tenure boards will not recognize blogs as scholarship in their own right.
By the way ... Science Debate is still a blank website for me in Safari (which means it may be blank in Chrome as well, as they are the same engine). I can see the updates in Firefox, however. You are definitely doing something that is not web-standard on that site.
Works fine for me in Safari Mac. Might be a problem with your PC.
Works fine for me in Safari Mac. Might be a problem with your PC.
I use a Mac. It has been a blank website for months now. Even when I clear cache.