Choose your favourite science blog
Attila Csordas of the blog Partial Immortalization draws attention (see above) to an article in The Scientist asking readers to nominate their favourite life-science blogs. To start the process, The Scientist asked seven science bloggers -- five who blog on the SEED platform and two independent science bloggers (Ed Silverman and Attila Csordas) to make some recommendations. These, as well as the many nominations received at The Scientist, will provide the curious scientific reader with plenty of online food for thought.
However, as Euan Adie points out at Nascent, The Scientist's article is incorrect to state that there is no guide to which science blogs to read (or indeed, where they are). As mentioned the other day on Nautilus in relation to books, Postgenomic is a free-access website which collects posts from hundreds of blogs and does interesting things with those data. Whether you're a reader, a blogger or a publisher, there are interesting and useful features on Postgenomic that I recommend trying out. Here, for example, are science blogs organised by subject and ordered by popularity. Another science-blog tracker and analyser is Chemical Blogspace.
Last year, Nature measured the "top" five science blogs indexed in Technorati (a search engine which measures the number of links to and from all blogs, not just scientific ones) and asked the bloggers concerned the reasons for their success. You can read their answers here. You can also read Nature's review of blogger Bora Zivkovic's collection of science writing on blogs,The Open Laboratory, here (Nature 447, 779; 2007).