@rpg: I agree! (whatever makes the judges happy…)

@Jim: I’ve been finding that there’s been a pretty good mix of industry and academia in the open science arena. Obviously a lot of open science principles go against industry motivations but at the same time there are some new business models based on concepts that are common in open science talk – CollabRx, for example, and the increasing focus on open collaboration to solve global problems in biomedicine. Plus developments like PatientsLikeMe and Google Health. As far as industry blogs go, I don’t follow very many but the 23andMe blog does a pretty good job of sharing thoughts and science without directly advertising their product for the most part.

I don’t have any answers, just observations. Great post Shirley…

@Duncan & Graham: I think Graham’s points are good ones – whoever you target needs to be either web savvy or approachable (and willing to try new things) enough to make them amenable to the idea, if not both. But if you can get someone who’s never used the web for anything other than browsing and email I think it could be an even bigger win (of course, someone may have to play IT guy for a while). Other than that, I don’t know who specifically to target, except perhaps heads of departments, PIs with high profile grants or appointments, PIs who are “cutting edge” in meat space but perhaps not yet in virtual space, who you think would be receptive?

@Chris: Thanks for the comment and the plug! I can see what you’re saying about the landscape “de-flattening”. There will always be blogs that are more popular than others by all sorts of criteria, but I think that the road to recognition is much more open – blogs come up very frequently on web searches, you can easily advertise your own simply by joining a FriendFeed room and sharing your feed, and if your posts are well-written and engaging then they will be passed around on those grounds alone. I guess my point is that it is relatively easy to be “found” these days, even with millions of blogs. Hopefully that won’t change anytime soon.

I’m very nearly entirely in agreement. I do take issue with the idea that blogging is entirely egalitarian — certainly, the barrier to entry is low, but as the enterprise develops I find that we’re finding ways to “de-flatten” the landscape.

One may be judged “by the quality of your writing and of your ideas”, but one is only judged when readers are able to find one’s writing in the first place. And when I look at the link structure of science blogging, and how distorted something like Seed’s ScienceBlogs has made that, I can’t help but feel that we’re taking this great tool and finding ways to recapitulate the inhomogeneity and “prestige”-based structure (and here I mean “prestige” in a sense that does not necessarily connote reputation based on direct observation of quality) of standard publishing. We don’t compute impact factors but we do live and die by things like page rank, Technorati score, and other things that might originally have had something to do with quality but now have everything to do with the structures people are creating around science blogging.

Not sure what to do about that, but it gets under my skin a bit, so I thought I’d vent.

My main point, though, was to congratulate you on a thoughtful and provocative post. I’ll be passing it around for sure.