Nascent

The Scientist posted an article last week asking readers to name their favourite life science blogs. They're going to collate the results and draw up something similar to Nature's Top 50 Science Blogs except based on the number of supportive comments rather than Technorati rank, explaining:

"there's really no guide to help inform you about what blogs you should be reading if you are interested in exploring the blogosphere"

*cough* Postgenomic *cough* Chemical Blogspace *cough* ;)

Anyway, it's a good idea and I like the fact that they're encouraging discussion on the comment threads of the blogs themselves.

They got the ball rolling by asking some popular bloggers (Carl Zimmer, PZ Myers & Attila Csordas, amongst others) to nominate their favourite blogs. After some brief controversy over a gender imbalance issue later addressed by the journalist who wrote the piece the suggestions started pouring in.

The comments thread makes for an interesting read. I found lots of interesting new (to me) blogs like Deep Sea News and Tetrapod Zoology.

Every so often, though, you'll see a run of commenters all suggesting the same blog, something that presumably correlates with the blogger in question pointing their readers towards the article and suggesting that they go cast a vote. Hmmm. All part of an open democratic process?

Attila included a few Nature blogs (The Niche, Nautilus and Nascent) on his seed list and I was pleased to see Nascent appear in the comments, too, at least until I noticed that the comment's author was Thomas, who is the editor of an NPG published journal. Not sure that counts.

(I'm not suggesting that anybody go vote for Nascent. Apart from anything else we're not a life sciences blog).

Oh, and for future reference: science blogs on Postgenomic.com, organized by subject area and ordered by popularity.

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