Yet more blogging?

Posted by William M. Connolley on April 19, 2006
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Tim Lambert notes that Science advocates blogging (and since they mention RC and scienceblogs, who can disagree?). They also mention James A; he raises the interesting point about blogs being tolerated rather than encouraged. Certainly I get no work-credit at all for this (not that I was expecting any) but its a fun thing to talk about at conference dinners. James points out Bryan Lawrences blog (which I had on my mustelid blogroll and have just added here) and how nice it is to see someone senior (albeit a bit techy :-) blogging.

Another example of someone senior “blogging” is Scientist on ice – Howard Dalton’s blog from the Antarctic but… its not really a blog, just a trip report, and is at the “This was my chance to hear some fascinating biology from some of the world’s experts in this field of “cryobiology”…” and “Most of all it has been Prof. Chris Rapley who’s made it all possible and who been an excellent host.Thanks so much!” end of things. Perhaps its a bit much to expect to read his secret thoughts. And he has no blogroll.

Anyway, my contribution to this little debate was to ponder what would happen if lots more people did start blogging. I’m at about saturation now (even using PF for aggregation). With 10x the number of bloggers, where would the time come from? Of course if people are actually blogging their papers (as RC does; as James does) then I can take the time from paper-reading time, and that would be ideal (not that I get that much time to read papers nowadays …:-()

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Comments

  1. #1 Q
    2006/04/19

    Blogs for Trips with or without (Acid) Rain, good stuff.
    Blogs for Climate Science & Climate Change, good good stuff

    Credit where credit is due.
    Credit Suisse still good for u?

  2. #2 James Annan
    2006/04/19

    But William,

    we don’t all have to read all of them! Given some “small world” connectivity, any useful infomation will propagate pretty effectively. Note how the same septic talking points resurface time after time…

    Lots of blogs only regurgitate what other blogs have said anyway, there’s little to be gained by reading yet another fisking of some WSJ op-ed :-)

    [OK, yes. But thats not the sort of thing that Science was trying to encourage, I would say. On reflection, if people are blogging their papers, the rate of posts on each blog would be much slower, except for the insanely productive -W]

    I find an RSS aggregator to be an effective way of managing blog reading. The biggest drawback is that some people don’t provide full content in their feed, and most blogs don’t have a decent comments feed (or even any comment feed at all, in the case of blogger). Mind you, most comment threads aren’t really worth reading anyway :-)

    [How very true... -W]