Steinn responds to yesterday's post about his comments about science blogging. I'm going to continue the tradition of responding here, rather than in his comments, because, well, I need something to post today.
He concedes that outreach is a worthy purpose of blogging, but continues to be concerned about blogging as a tool for more traditional science:
Is blogging enabling collaborations?
Is blogging leading to new initiatives? New directions in research? Providing connectivity which would not otherwise have happened? Conveying information that is important to research and otherwise hard to obtain?
Is blogging generating papers? New research?It ought to be able to, blogging is social networking, and science has known for centuries about the importance of social networks, which is why we ship our students around to other institutions, write
laborious letters in latinterse never read e-mails, and go to interminable conferences and workshops.But in science, I don't see blogging enabled science happening, yet.
Maybe some internal blogs with restricted access are doing this, although all the cases I know of have fizzled because of poor structuring.
Personally, I'm not terribly concerned about these issues, mostly because I don't think they really use the potential of the medium. This is why I've never been all the way on board with the Science 2.0 crowd-- it seems to me that using Web tools to do traditional science is sort of like having a really cool tricked-out sports car, and only using it to sit in the driveway and listen to CD's.
The whole point of a car is to take you to other places, to enable you to get out and move around. Listening to your favorite album of the in-car sound system may be a really great experience, and it might well be a better sound system than you have in the house, but it sort of squanders the potential of the car.
In the same way, I think that the most important feature of the World Wide Web is that it's, well, world wide. Anybody with a computer has access to whatever you post on a blog or other web site, and it seems like a shame not to make use of that to bring what you do to a wider audience. Using blogs to work out the details of something that only you and a half-dozen collaborators have any hope of following just seems like a waste of potential.
(Not to mention the fact that it's really not the right tool for the job. Something in the Wiki vein is probably better for traditional-type collaboration.)
I think that projects using the mass audience offered by the Web to do science that otherwise couldn't be done-- the various "crowdsourcing" projects and the like-- are really interesting, but I'm just not that excited about using blogs to do the usual "half a dozen people kick ideas around then write a paper in several drafts" kind of science. It's nice if it works, but it's kind of a secondary effect, as I see it.
Nevertheless, I can offer two guesses at an answer to Steinn's question, which is, essentially, "Why doesn't blogging generate more traditional science?"
1) Paranoia. As noted in the discussion of why biologists don't have an arxiv, a lot of people in science are very leery of being scooped. Anything put on a blog is available to the entire world, and thus to the competitors of the people posting it. That's a powerful deterrent when the (perceived) stakes are really high-- if you put your good ideas on a blog, somebody else might use them and beat you to press, and get the tenured position that ought to be yours.
2) Science is small. There are a lot of scientists in the world, but the actual practice of science generally breaks down into relatively small sub-fields, most of which are small enough that it's possible to know essentially everyone working on the same sorts of problems that you are. Scientists aren't using tools like blogs to build new social networks, because their social networks already encompass most if not all of the people they think they might collaborate with.
(Whether they're right about that is an open question-- there's a case to be made that really big benefits will come from expanding social networks to people whose expertise isn't obviously relevant. It's hard to convince people of that, though.)
These are, of course, only guesses. Feel free to explain why I'm way off base in the comments.
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We discussed these issues at ScienceBlogging 2008 this summer. Here's a video of one of the sessions (fast forward through the first guy's talk, I for one can't bear to listen to him), and somewhere there should be a recording of the final session, which covered some of the same ground.
My own. experience is that blogging has lead to collaborations, and new connectivity. A lot of it is about reaching the right audience: for one of my better received posts I made a point of emailing a newsgroup with the right people in it, pointing it out to them.
Incidentally, biologists do have an arXiv, but they don't use it as much, for a variety of reasons (including paranoia).
A novel experiment that arose from public dialog:
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz4.pdf
A parity Eötvös experiment can falsify the Equivalence Principle
The best objection: "it lacks precedent". 400 years of EP challenges nulled wthin experimental error. Sepracor makes unprecedented $billions for separating left from right pharmaceutical shoes. Do the obvious in physics.
"I don't believe it."
"That is why you fail."
Chad, I know PZ isn't your favourite person, but I think that on some non-religious issues like this, you guys may be reasonably close in opinion. My evidence? This blog entry on the roles of blogs and journals.
The thing that he said, that echoed some of the sentiments you've stated, was:
Sadly, he doesn't specify any suggestions as to how to change normal. But of course, that's the challenge, isn't it?
On the other hand, I've had watercooler discussions about science. Trying to do my part.