We’ve heard about bloggers numbers one and two (Anna Kushnir and Bronwen Dekker) and probed our third and fourth longest-serving scribblers (Henry Gee and Jennifer Rohn). Time now to move on to another esteemed set of early contributors to these pages.

The excitement was palpable in the office when Richard Grant agreed to start blogging on Nature Network on 29 May 2007. We had our first blogger from the Southern Hemisphere. Richard worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Sydney, where he’d cut his weblog teeth writing the Life of a Lab Rat. Richard was also a Brit abroad, but showed an immediate mastery for native parlance with his very first word on Nature Network: G’day. His debut post went on to promise:

Here, because I’m writing under my real name and because I suspect most readers will know what being a scientist is like anyway, I intend to be a little more ‘philosophical’, perhaps a little less specific about actual events.

His peerless record of posts covers any number of topics, with common themes being the application of social media to science, those little crevices of joy where science meets culture, and the experience of changing careers and continents when he moved back to the UK to work for a publisher.

Two months after Richard’s debut, David Basanta moved his existing blog ‘Cancerevo’ over to Nature Network. Here’s his first post. David’s interests lay in making connections between evolution and diseases, specifically cancer. His posts are a little more scholarly in tone than some of the more celebrated blogs on the Network, often theoretical or speculative, yet his writing is consistently thought-provoking and worthy of greater attention. He now posts once a month, most recently on the evolutionary underpinnings of metastasis.

Finally, to Eva Amsen. Like Richard and David, Eva was already an accomplished blogger when she joined Nature Network, writing on Easternblot.net (a site she still maintains). Her life as a Nature Networker began on 3 July 2007 with this introductory post. Her blog Expression Patterns is wide ranging, with regular posts about blogger meetups, social media musings and the more kooky side of science culture. Like Richard, Eva also recently shifted job and jurisdiction, moving from Toronto to Cambridge (UK) to take up a role in publishing (via a few days working freelance on Nature Network).