Back (barely) from the NC Science Blogging Conference

As I mentioned previously, I spent the weekend in North Carolina discussing blogging, science, medicine, and other sundry topics with about 200 other bloggers and interested folks at the 2008 Science Blogging Conference. The sessions were excellent, and I loved the "unconference" format. Science writer Becky Oskin and I ran a session on "Blogging public health and medicine," which Mad Biologist was nice enough to summarize here. We'd started out bringing along a powerpoint presentation just in case, but the participants certainly weren't shy about speaking up, so we ended up ditching that format and went with more of a participant-directed discussion (which still ended up touching on many of the topics we'd brought up at the wiki link above).

In addition to my own session, I also attended the session on Open Science, and how open-access publishing and blogging could work to change the way science is done, written, and communicated to others. Zuska, Karen, Pat, and Sciencewoman (with Minnow!) led a discussion on women and under-represented minorities in (and blogging about) science. The day ended with a panel discussion on The "F" word and ScienceDebate 2008, and then Jennifer wrapped up the conference discussing "Adventures in Science Blogging (see the link for much more on that).

I'm being harped-on to wrap this up, but I'll be back with more thoughts on the conference later (and some links to the bloggers I met, which this conference has proved to me once again are simply a spectacular group of people). More plague blogging coming up in the next day or two as well...