I knew I wasn’t in Cambridge yesterday when I saw a sign that said:

Killing embryos for stem cell research. Right or wrong? Panel debate

Not exactly the unemotional wording seen on event posters in Cambridge. I was on the campus of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to attend the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference 170 bloggers, scientists, teachers and journalists gathered to talk about the state of the art of science blogging and where it was headed.

It’s been 4 years since the first science blogs began and the science blogosphere has since grown big enough to put on its own conference. Yes, the community has even evolved to the point of having cliques: I could tell who the veteran bloggers were since they all seemed to know each other and stuck together. But there were plenty of newbies there: old-school journalists and publishing folks like me and even middle school science teachers looking for ways to connect with their students who’ve probably been blogging since childhood.

In listening to the talks, I realized just how many scientist-written blogs there are out there, and also the variety: they not only debunk pseudoscience but some are quite technical and discuss the latest findings in a specific field, like a virtual journal club. Some are educational and are used as a teaching tool. Some scientists are now even using their blogs to talk about hypotheses and their latest experiments, including unpublished results.

But the reality is, most scientists don’t blog and there was a lot of discussion about why that is. One is that scientists in the US aren’t in the habit of communicating with the public about science in any way, unlike their European colleagues. A grad student-blogger said she writes anonymously because blogging is often seen as “goofing off” online and not important to research, even though it’s really just another form of communication (and isn’t communication key to science?).

One of the keynote speakers, Hunt Willard, head of Duke’s Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, said blogging is seen as “shooting from the hip” (spontaneous, unpredictable, risky), something that scientists who labor over manuscripts for weeks/months, would balk at or even look down on.

And there’s the perception that blogging (ie giving opinions, saying controversial things, sticking your neck out, or even just spending time doing it) can actually hurt your career as a scientist. A couple people at the conference alleged that some people they knew didn’t get tenure because of their prolific blogging activities.

Science blogging evangelists at the conference, though, did their best to convince the audience of the merits of blogging: helps form a sense of community, gets your name, research and hopefully original ideas out there, and fosters discussions about policy, ethics or even the nitty-gritty of the latest results…conversations that probably wouldn’t happen elsewhere, at least not in a way that is as dynamic.

In the end, many were optimistic about the future: when the old fogies are gone and the ranks of professors are filled with people who grew up surfing the Net, then maybe blogging and other forms of open online scientific discussions might become the accepted norm.

Tomorrow, I’ll post a couple more things about the conference: open science and how blogging saved one scientist’s career.