Science and blogging

Carl Zimmer has posted some interesting experiences with blogging scientific papers. As he wrote:

I suspect this situation has come about because scientists as a group are only just becoming comfortable in the blogging environment.

But, I think blogging and forum discussion is getting more and more common when the scientist get hammered out the etiquette of scientific engagement as one of the comments emphasize. It also has to find the right arenas for their discussions, but this will probably happen withing a couple of years, and then we will see a much more rapid moving scientific progress.

So, I do what any science writer does. I read the new paper and looked for some comments. I email Nick Matzke, a co-author of an earlier paper on this topic. He wasn't impressed. To register his displeasure, he wasn't content just to send me a grousing email. He blogged at length on Panda's Thumb. Commenters threw in their own two cents. Meanwhile, another source-turned-blogger, Ryan Gregory (whom I wrote about in an article on dinosaur genomes), wrote about the study as well, to which Larry Moran, himself a blogger as well as University of Toronto biochemist, responded harshly in the comments, saying that the paper should never have been published. (Moran, Matzke, and others complain about the methods the ASU scientists used to identify related genes.)

http://scienceblogs.com/loom/2007/04/17/when_scientists_go_all_bloggy.php