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Blogs or weblogs are websites that are frequently updated. The information on blogs is presented in reverse chronological order. Often other characteristics are mentioned in relation to blogs as well, but most of these are platform dependent What makes blogs different from formal, corporate sites or news sources: they are authored by individuals and perceived as 'personal voices'. Blogs are an example of the so called Web 2.0 developments.
Albeit the fact that the Internet and World Wide Web were basically invented and developed by scientists, scientists have been relatively slow to adopt blogs as part of the Web 2.0 developments. Having said that, blogging is slowly catching on in the scientific world.
Science blogs aggregators
A few aggregation sites for science and research blogs exist. First and foremost is Scienceblogs.com an aggregation for just over 75 blogs from scientist and researchers. The prestigious science journal Nature maintains a selection of premier scientific blogs, next to their network of blogs. Other aggregators include scientific blogging, the academic blog portal and research blogging. The last one has created a community for blogged comments on peer reviewed scholarly articles.
Searching for science blogs
Since the information in the blogosphere changes rather quickly dedicated blog search engines have been developed. Next to the blog search engine from Google, other good blog search engines include the blog search from Ask, Icerocket and Technorati.
Why scientists blog?
Scientists blog for a plethora of reasons. Amongst other is that they practice their writing skills -in public- and use their blog as a stage for arguing, discussing and commenting on research. Whilst blogging they also manage their own knowledge, and engage in the public discussion on scientific topics. They build themselves a platform on the Web to expose their scientific ideas and use it to educate their audience.More information Efimova, L. (2009). Passion at work: blogging practices of knowledge workers. Enschede, Novay. 255p.