Today's Nature picks up the conference blogging story that I covered last week. An interesting perspective:
[Cancer researcher Francis] Ouellette and many other active bloggers are also members of the 'open science' movement, which encourages researchers to make their data public as quickly as possible. Bradley sees this openness as a powerful deterrent to anyone hoping to scoop him at a conference because anything cribbed from his talk is already out on the Internet for everyone else to view. "If someone actually does copy something, I think it would be pretty embarrassing," he says, "it's already there, and it's indexed to Google."
I use blogging that way from time to time. To tell you the truth, I think it's embarrassing when I see letters to the editor of journals, published three or four months after the fact, that parrot criticisms of a paper that somebody made on a blog the day a paper appeared. Blogging doesn't spread obvious ideas to the clueful; it clues them in that somebody else had the obvious idea, too.
As for the clueless, well, they're not following blogs anyway, are they?
