Why scientists write and read blogs
What's the point of blogging? is a question asked by Duncan Hull at Nodalpoint: are people wasting their time reading and writing blogs? As Duncan writes, "most leading scientists are too damn busy to pay much attention to the blogosphere, especially when it descends (as it frequently does) into "uncontrollable verbal discharge". " There follows a list of links to various articles about scientific blogging in Nature, Cell and other publications, including one with the title "Ten Reasons Why Blogging is Good for your career", with a perhaps predictable rejoinder, "Ten Reasons Why Blogging doesn't matter". Among other sentiments, this last article (written in March 2005) contains this summary of relevance to scientists: "Bloggers tend to have strong, acute viewpoints on niche issues - a lot like academia, in fact. Except that unlike research papers, blogging is not subject to peer review before going to press, nor does it need to have bibliography and references."
