Steinn asks a provocative question:
has science blogging done any good?
I can think of science policy issues where blogging has made a contribution, and the general spread of information and communication done by blogs has probably had some impact, but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.
I think this is a badly framed question. That is, I think it’s a mistake to define “good” for science to exclude science policy questions and the general spread of information. It’s a very common mistake, mind, and indicative of the pernicious attitude among academics that technical research within a discipline is the only thing that counts.
In fact, I’m not even sure that Steinn’s counter-example is a good one. He contrasts science blogging to economics blogging (economics, of course, is not a real science, but rather the astronomy of the social sciences):
As an outsider, my perception is that economic blogs are much more effective at communicating technical information and policy differences, possibly because the readership is less intimidated by economics. I also get the sense that economists use their blogs for actual inter-blog communication and resolve differences (or agree to disagree) in public, and possibly even generate new concepts on-blog.
Steinn probably reads more econ blogs than I do, but my even-more-outside perception is that most of the issues discussed on economics blogs are closely tied to policy questions. That is, people debate the meaning of various changes in policy, and their effect on the host of indicators that economists talk about.
Economics blogging looks more successful than science blogging only because it’s harder to draw the arbitrary boundary that Steinn does between policy questions and disciplinary research. If you were to restrict “success” to only those blogs leading to scholarly publications in peer-reviewed economics journals, I’m not sure they’d look all that much better than blogs in biology, math, or theoretical physics.
But this is really a side issue. The bigger question, here, is how to really understand what should count as “good.” I would argue that it’s pure folly not to consider effects on public perception and questions of policy. Modern science is simply not possible without large amounts of public funding, so positive effects on issues of policy and funding are good for science, in a much more concrete way than yet another publication in the Journal of Arcane Subfield Physics.
It’s also true, alas, that this is not the usual definition used by academics (he says, knowing that he needs to fill out his annual activities report). I would argue, though, that the failure to consider larger contexts when evaluating the success or failure of the activities of scientists is a significant factor leading to the marginalization of science in our society.
It has helped my teaching of general classes a lot not much impact on research. My criticism is that there is a fair amount of navel gazing within science blogs and also as a result of reading science blogs.
“but has any actual science been directly impacted by blogs, or discussion on blogs? I am hard pressed to think of concrete examples.”
The answer to this question is probably yes — for instance, Jacques Distler’s (MathML and SVG-enabled!) blog has had plenty of professional-level discussion over the years.
There are a few ways for a blog to impact research directly (beyond science policy/funding issues):
1. A reader is inspired by something he/she read in a blog to come up with a new idea for his/her own research. This can be on a grand scale: Some scientist or engineer could read a biology-related blog and decide to figure out how to mimic some form of natural behavior. It can also be something much more practical and small scale. For instance, Chad has written before about the different types of equipment (such as vacuum pumps) he uses in his experiments. Some reader may choose his/her lab equipment or procedure based upon something read in a similar blog.
2. A high school/undergraduate blog reader is inspired to enter into a particular field of research based on reading a blog.
3. The blogger can help get answers to his/her own research issues through comments from blog readers.
I think Steinn was probably focusing more on the third possibility, which I would think is probably the least likely to occur. A blogger needs a certain critical mass of informed, regular readers before his blog can yield substantive debate. You need the right people reading at the right time before your blog post retires into the ether. Otherwise, you’re just relying on serendipity. And that’s only if the blogger is really willing to lay out all the nuts and bolts of his/her research for all the world to see..
The first two cases probably occur much more often, but the blogger may or may not know about it.
===================================================
Professor Jonathan Vos Post’s top 10 favorite Math websites and blogs
===================================================
(0) INTRODUCTION: WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR IDEAS?
At any given time, I am in the middle of reading 10 books, 20 scientific papers (online, jornal, and preprint or reprint hardcopy), 4 newspapers (a national, a local, a city, and an international), 20 blogs I look at daily (including Uncertain Priciples!), and emails to and from 100 collaborators.
I write notes to myself on the journals, preprint, newspapers, email replies to myself. I tear out pages of newspapers and magazines and elaborate on the notes. I cut and paste from online sources (with full attribution) and bounce them off collaborators.
I write down the particularly vivid dreams I have before getting out of bed in the morning (as Ray Bradbury recommends).
I open and re-read and tweak each of a dozen short stories, novellas, novels, science papers, and the like that I’m writing.
My wife complains about the vast stacks of papers and journals, half-sorted into boxes and envelopes.But she’s a Physics professor, so she understands.
===================================================
(1) OEIS
[the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences]
http://www.research.att.com/~njas/sequences/
On the average of over once per day for the past 5 years I “do the math” on something that I see online, or dream up by analogy, and work it through to analytic or numerical solution, references and hotlinks to existing literature, and state conjectures that present themselves from “getting my hands dirty” with actual data; then submit this
directly of via an Associate Editor/collaborator at the Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (hosted by AT&T Research Labs) where I currently (as of this week) have exactly 2,057 contributions or comments searchable on their search engine, each date-stamped and with my email, so that people email me from all over the world.
This amazing web resource has some 140,000 web pages so far, and is growing fast.
The level of these ranges from elementary to extremely advanced. Among other things, this can be considered a source for tens of thousands of homework problems for almost any level of math, so long as the answer is an integer (or a fraction with integer numerator and
denominator, or a real number where the sequence is the digits of the decimal expansion).
To see just my 1,900 entries, Google “OEIS”, go there, use their search engine on my full name (Jonathan Vos Post).
The On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (OEIS), also cited simply as Sloane’s, is an extensive searchable database of integer sequences, freely available on the Web.
OEIS records information on integer sequences of interest to both professional mathematicians and amateurs, and is widely cited. It contains over 135,000 sequences, making it the largest database of its kind.
Each entry contains the leading terms of the sequence, keywords, mathematical motivations, literature links, and more, including the option to generate a graph or play a musical representation of the sequence. The database is searchable by keyword and by subsequence.
History
Neil Sloane started collecting integer sequences as a student in the mid-1960’s to support his work in combinatorics. The database was at first stored on punch cards. He published selections from the database
in book form twice:
1. A Handbook of Integer Sequences (1973, ISBN 0-12-648550-X), containing 2,400 sequences.
2. The Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences with Simon Plouffe (1995, ISBN 0-12-558630-2), containing 5,487 sequences.
These books were well received and, especially after the second publication, mathematicians supplied Sloane with a steady flow of new sequences. The collection became unmanageable in book form, and when the database had reached 16,000 entries Sloane decided to go online–first as an e-mail service (August 1994), and soon after as a
web site (1995). The database continues to grow at a rate of some 10,000 entries a year.
Sloane has personally managed ‘his’ sequences for almost 40 years, but starting in 2002, a board of associate editors and volunteers has helped maintain the database.
As a spin-off from the database work, Sloane founded the Journal of Integer Sequences in 1998. I have co-authored one paper in that Journal, with T. D. Noe, who has since become an Associate Editor of OEIS.
In 2004, Sloane celebrated the addition of the 100,000th sequence to the database, A100000. In 2006, the user interface was overhauled and more advanced search capabilities were added.
Non-integers
Besides integer sequences strictly speaking, OEIS also catalogued sequences of fractions, the digits of transcendental numbers, complex numbers and so on by transforming them into integer sequences.
Sequences of rationals are represented by two sequences (named with the keyword ‘frac’): the sequence of numerators and the sequence of denominators. For example, the fifth order Farey sequence, {1/5}, {1/4}, {1/3}, {2/5}, {1/2}, {3/5}, {2/3}, {3/4}, {4/5}, is catalogued
as the numerator sequence 1, 1, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 4 (A006842) and the denominator sequence 5, 4, 3, 5, 2, 5, 3, 4, 5 (A006843).
Important irrational numbers such as Ï = 3.1415926535897… are catalogued under representative integer sequences such as decimal expansions (here 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 9, 2, 6, … (A000796)) or continued fraction expansions (here 3, 7, 15, 1, 292, 1, … (A001203)).
Conventions
The OEIS is currently limited to plain ASCII text, so it uses a linear form of conventional mathematical notation [such as f(n) for functions, n for running variables, etc.]. Greek letters are usually represented by their full names, e.g., mu for μ, phi for Ï.
Every sequence is identified by the letter A followed by six digits, sometimes referred to without the leading zeros, e.g., A315 rather than A000315.
Individual terms of sequences are separated by commas. Digit groups are not separated by commas, periods, or spaces.
In comments, formulas, etc., a(n) represents the nth term of the sequence.
Special meaning of zero
Zero is often used to represent non-existent sequence elements. For example, A104157 enumerates the “smallest prime of n consecutive primes to form an nÃn magic square of least magic constant, or 0 if no such magic square exists.” The value of a(1) (a 1Ã1 magic square) is
2; a(3) is 1480028129. But there is no such 2Ã2 magic square, so a(2) is 0.
This special usage has a solid mathematical basis in certain counting functions. For example, the totient valence function NÏ(m) (A014197) counts the solutions of
Ï(x) = m. There are 4 solutions for 4, but no solutions for 14, hence a(14) of A014197 is 0–there are no solutions.
Occasionally -1 is used for this purpose instead, as in A094076.
Lexicographic ordering
The OEIS maintains the lexicographic order of the sequences, so each sequence has a predecessor and a successor (its “context”). OEIS normalizes the sequences for lexicographic ordering, (usually) ignoring initial zeros or ones and also the sign of each element.
Sequences of weight distribution codes often omit periodically recurring zeros.
For example, consider: the prime numbers, the palindromic primes, the Fibonacci sequence, the lazy caterer’s sequence, and the coefficients in the series expansion of {zeta(n + 2)} over {zeta(n)}. In OEIS
lexicographic order, they are:
Sequence #1: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 89, 97, …
Sequence #2: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 101, 131, 151, 181, 191, 313, 353, 373, 383, 727, 757, 787, 797, 919, 929, …
Sequence #3: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, …
Sequence #4: 1, 2, 4, 7, 11, 16, 22, 29, 37, 46, 56, 67, 79, 92, …
Sequence #5: 1, â3, â8, â3, â24, 24, â48, â3, â8, 72, â120, 24, â168, 144, …
whereas unnormalized lexicographic ordering would order these sequences thus: #3, #5, #4, #1, #2.
Self-referentiality
Very early in the history of the OEIS, many people suggested sequences derived from the placement of sequences in the OEIS itself. “I resisted adding these sequences for a long time, partly out of a desire to maintain the dignity of the database, and partly because A22 was only known to 11 terms!” Sloane reminisced.
One of the earliest self-referential sequences Sloane accepted into the OEIS was A031135 (later A091967) “a(n) = n-th term of sequence A_n.” This sequence spurred progress on finding more terms of A000022. For larger n that correspond to sequences that are finite and given in
full (keywords “fini” and “full”), term a(n) of A091967 is undefined.
A100544 lists the first term given in sequence An, but it needs to be updated from time to time because of changing opinions on offsets. Listing instead term a(1) of sequence An might seem a good alternative if it weren’t for the fact that some sequences have offsets of 2 and greater.
This line of thought leads to the question “Is n in sequence An?” and the delightfully paradoxical sequences A053873, n is in An, and A053169, n is not in An. Thus, the composite number 2808 is in A053873 because A002808 is the sequence of composite numbers, while the non-prime 40 is in A053169 because it’s not in A000040, the prime numbers. The paradox is, which sequences do 53169 and 53873 belong to?
(This is a form of Russell’s paradox.)
===================================================
(2) PRIME CURIOS
[google that]
“Prime Curios!” is an exciting collection of curiosities, wonders and trivia related to prime numbers.
I have met many folk who could not see the value in stopping to smell a wildflower, collecting a unique coin, or watching the rolling clouds in a spring-time thunderstorm. The old maxim states: “Beauty is in
the eye of the beholder.” Why not sample a few of our curios and see how our eye compares?
This is an evolving collection at the Prime Pages; so we would be pleased to hear your opinions and suggestions.
Managing Editors:
* Content editor: G. L. Honaker, Jr.
* Technical editor: Chris Caldwell
Our goal is to create a collection (a dictionary if you will) of individual prime numbers with interesting properties or forms. So just what is exciting about the prime 313? What might we discover about 9999999900000001? Since the number of primes is infinite, we can not list them all; but we can list the small ones that are
especially curious.
Do you know an interesting number we should add? Can you explain your curio in a way that would be understandable to a general audience? In a tone that would make others want to hear more? If so, let us know. Can you find the first missing prime curio?
There are currently 7531 curios corresponding to 4492 different numbers in our database, that leaves an infinite number for you to discover! Database last updated 5/8/2008 at 8:28 CDT.
If a cute prime pops up, I make a submission to Prime Curios (edited by two professors at a university), where I am now the #4 contributor, with 246 curios about 222 different numbers.
Slightly specialized (primes and related concepts such as semiprimes) but, again. both elementary, intermediate, advanced, and mixed with references to History, pop culture, and the like.
For example, for the number 7 I contributed:
“The sum of the 7 primes beginning with 7 is 7 times the 7th prime.”
===================================================
(3) Mathworld
[google for it]
MathWorld(TM) is the web’s most extensive mathematical resource, provided as a free service to the world’s mathematics and internet communities as part of a commitment to education and educational outreach by Wolfram Research, makers of Mathematica.
MathWorld has been assembled over more than a decade by Eric W. Weisstein (one of my Caltech co-alumni) with assistance from thousands of contributors. Since its contents first appeared online in 1995, MathWorld has emerged as a nexus of mathematical information in both
the mathematics and educational communities. It not only reaches millions of readers from all continents of the globe, but also serves as a clearinghouse for new mathematical discoveries that are routinely
contributed by researchers. Its entries are extensively referenced in journals and books spanning all educational levels, including those read by researchers, elementary school students and teachers, engineers, and hobbyists.
MathWorld continues to grow and evolve with the assistance of thousands of contributors. Careful oversight of all aspects of its content and interface by creator Eric Weisstein, and more recently with able assistance from MathWorld associate Ed Pegg, Jr., provides an exacting level of quality, accuracy, and consistency. As a result,
MathWorld is considered not only the clearest and most readable online resource for mathematics, but also one of the most reliable.
MathWorld is actively developed and maintained. The site is updated daily, thus achieving extremely rapid communication of new and extended results–many of which are provided by outside contributors–while at the same time maintaining a degree of editorial oversight and consistency across (and among) the site’s nearly 13,000 entries that is simply not possible for other sites.
MathWorld currently features a number of innovative interactive elements that enhance its usability for a variety of different readers. These features include:
* The MathWorld Classroom, which provides a set of pop-up “capsule summaries” for more than 300 mathematical terms.
* Extensive citations to books and journal articles, many of which are active hyperlinks.
* Thousands of downloadable Mathematica notebooks.
* Several types of interactive entries, including LiveGraphics3D applets for interactive three-dimensional geometry.
* A powerful full-text search engine with both basic and advanced searching capabilities.
* Dublin Core and Mathematics Subject Classification metadata in the HTML headers of each page.
* Special information for Mathematica users.
The technology behind MathWorld is heavily based on Mathematica. In addition to being indispensable in the derivation, validation, and visualization of MathWorld’s content, Mathematica is used to build the website itself, taking advantage of its advanced mathematical typesetting and data-processing capabilities.
The MathWorld team welcomes your feedback. Please visit the extensive set of Q&A pages where you can find answers to many common queries. If you have comments, please use the comment form to send a message to the MathWorld team. Contributions of new entries are especially appreciated and, after editorial review, appear on MathWorld with
grateful attribution to their authors. Please also note that there are a number of things you can do to help support MathWorld as a free public resource. Finally, feel free to add links to MathWorld entries to your own pages.
My own 29 contributed entries include:
Alon-Tarsi Conjecture
Arabic Numeral
Bôcher Prize
Busemann-Petty Problem
Cartesian Curve
Cauchy Condensation Test
Central Trinomial Coefficient
e-Prime
Emirpimes
Hoyle’s Social Network Theorem
i
Milliard
Multiple Edge
Near-Square Prime
Phi-Prime
Pi-Prime
Polyhe
Self-Recursion
Tetranacci Constant
To give two of my examples (through see the site for proper formatting):
Arabic Numeral
“Arabic numerals” are the numerical symbols 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 0. Historically, Indian numerals evolved in Arab usage roughly 1000 A.D., and there was rare European usage in that period. Common use in Europe took another four to five centuries, with one highlight being when Fibonacci wrote in his famous book Liber abaci published in
Pisa in 1202, “When my father, who had been appointed by his country as public notary in the customs at Bugia acting for the Pisan merchants going there, was in charge, he summoned me to him while I was still a child, and having an eye to usefulness and future convenience, desired me to stay there and receive instruction in the school of accounting. There, when I had been introduced to the art of
the Indians’ nine symbols through remarkable teaching, knowledge of the art very soon pleased me above all else and I came to understand it, for whatever was studied by the art in Egypt, Syria, Greece, Sicily and Provence, in all its various forms.”
SEE ALSO: Greek Numerals, Numeral, Roman Numerals
This entry contributed by Jonathan Vos Post (author’s link)
REFERENCES:
O’Connor, J. J. and Robertson, E. F. “The Arabic Numeral System.”
CITE THIS AS:
Post, Jonathan Vos. “Arabic Numeral.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource, created by Eric W. Weisstein.
and another:
Hoyle’s Social Network Theorem
A (presumably autobiographical) character in one of astrophysicist Fred Hoyle’s novels opined the following. “I figure that if to be totally known and totally loved is worth 100, and to be totally unknown and totally unloved is worth 0, then to be totally known and totally unloved must be worth at least 50.”
SEE ALSO: Social Network Theory
This entry contributed by Jonathan Vos Post (author’s link)
REFERENCES:
Gordon, B. B. (Ed.) Songs from Unsung Worlds. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1985.
Post, J. V. and Feynman, R. “Footnote to Feynman.” Engineering & Science (Caltech Newsletter) 46, No. 5, p. 28, May 1983.
CITE THIS AS:
Post, Jonathan Vos. “Hoyle’s Social Network Theorem.” From
MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource, created by Eric W. Weisstein.
===================================================
(4) Ï: MATH Pages of Jonathan Vos Post
[google for it]
This tells you a lot about me, what I do in Math, and links to other web sites of mine such as PROFESSIONAL “GENEOLOGY”: MY TEACHERS’
TEACHERS’ TEACHERS on who my teachers were (and their teachers, and their teachers, back to Andres Segovia (in my Music career); Ezra Pound (in my Poetry career); Bertrand Russell and others (in my Science/Philosophy career); Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein (in my Science/Physics career); Sarah Bernhardt [1844-1923], Eleonora Duse [1859-1924], Anton Chekhov [1860-1904] Moscow Art Theatre, and Stanislavski (in my Acting/Theatre career)i; and
Andreas Vesalius, Gabriel Fallopius, and others at the Islamic Medicine faculty at University of Montpellier in the 15th century (the 1400s).
google for “JVPteachers.html”
The page I started telling you about, before I distracted myself with my teachers, begins (but see it for proper formatting and hotlinks)
“This sentence contains ten words, eighteen syllables, and sixty-four letters.”
[Jonathan Vos Post, Scientific American, reprinted in
“Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern”, by Douglas R. Hofstadter, paperback reprint March 1996, pp.26-27]
Jonathan Vos Post is a Professor of Mathematics at Woodbury University in Burbank, California. His first degree in Mathematics was from Caltech in 1973. He is also, or has been also, a Professor of Astronomy at Cypress College in Orange County, California; Professor of Computer Science
at California State University, Los Angeles; and Professor of English Composition at Pasadena City College. He is a widely published author of Science Fiction, Science, Poetry, Math, Drama, and other fields. In his so-called spare time, he wins elections for local political offices and produces operas, as Secretary of Euterpe Opera Theatre.
His Erdos Number is 5.
===================================================
(5) MATHEMATICS: Fantasy and Science Fiction about Mathematics
[google for “thisthat.html#math”]
Warning: the above-linked page is over 300 Kilobytes long, and may load slowly. That’s because it has not only the listed topic, but an original encyclopedia of many other subgenres of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
===================================================
(extra) My Favorite Math Blogs
Now and then I submit my own warped comments on these fascinating blogs, which I shall not stop to explain.
Ars Mathematica
[google for it]
I often start with this one, because it links to many of these others (most rather advanced).
* It’s equal but it’s different
* Lambda the Ultimate
* Lieven Le Bruyn
* n-Category Cafe
* Neighborhood of Infinity
* Not Even Wrong
Dominated by an erudite and entertaining attack on String Theory
* Scott Aaronson
Mostly about Computer Science and Complexity. he had an article earlier this year in Scientific American.
* Unapologetic Mathematician
And so, without apologies, I thank you for your time and attention.
* What’s new
This is by the former child prodigy from Australia, now the youngest professor at UCLA, Terrence “Terry” Tao, which has some super-advanced stuff, mixed in with useful career advice in Math.
===================================================
Jonathan, have you ever thought of just getting your own blog?
Real Climate has discussions that are a sort of comment-and-reply written to be accessible to non-scientists. They get enough attention that the authors of papers that have been discussed often comment on the posts. I’m not sure whether disagreements are resolved, though.
Ouch,
Hey, it was late at night and it turns out I was coming down with bad strep throat…
Seriously. I was not excluding policy and outreach as goods, I considered those already over the threshold as proved to be within blog functions.
What I was pondering was the absence of “inreach” – peer-to-peer communication leading to science progress – the motive for funding, for example, workshops.
Scientists do social netowrking, we know how to work the nets, but blogs are not being utilized even though they are exemplary social network constructs.
I have actually found that blogging has opened many doors for me networking-wise. However, that is often only within the blogging world itself, and for the purposes of my blogging.
But I know that most of the scientists I work with would be very leery of showing their current research on a blog. It’s not that they don’t want criticism (we always like possible mistakes pointed out BEFORE we make them!), and the input would be great in many fields, but I think most of them have a greater fear of being scooped. I know many professors who get very upset when people try to take pictures of their posters at conferences, and who live in fear that someone may steal a hot project.
While many people try to get past the fear of getting scooped and try to be open-handed and generous with their research findings, there is still the deep fear that your thesis will come out of another lab with more hands, who just got it out faster. I think that fear is what prevents a lot of “inreach” that you speak of.
There’s also the idea of an “old boys” network. Many scientists are very comfortable with the few collaborators and colleagues they’ve always had. They organize workshops and conferences around those people and their work, and perhaps they view reaching out to other possible colleagues through the internet as too much work, or as likely to upset colleagues they already have. And the new potential people you hear from on the internet aren’t necessarily vetted, and I know that’s a major source of worry. I’m not saying these worries are justified, because in a perfect world they wouldn’t be. But the worries still exist.
First, can’t the arXiv be considered a blog? It is certainly web-based, not a journal, and acts as a combination of preprint repository and collaborationware. My earlier comment began wirth OEIS because of its size and secondary function as collaborationware.
Second, re: # 5 | Alex , I have a 13-year-old web domain that gets over 15,000,000 hits per year LiveJournal blog, but don’t use it much. If I’m on topic, what’s wrong with making comments on others’ blogs, as a kind of distributed blog? There’s a guy at IdeaLab who promised 8 or 9 months ago to take the blog comments I email him and put them up on an IdeaLab-hosted blog, but never got around to it.
Third, per Chad’s thread 27 June 2008, Sean Carroll gave his “caveat that science blogs can do pretty much anything you want them to do.”
For historical accuracy, I’d like to consider John Baez’s “This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics” as the first significant science blog, and arguably the first science blog of any kind, and even arguably the first blog of any kind. Some research seems to spring from that.
That sets the standard. Chad and Sean usually meet that standard. Blake Stacey usually sets the standard for comments on those blogs.
I’m not good enough to meet that standard as a blogger, so I content myself with submitting comments to the best science blogs that I regularly visit, which include all those listed above, several other Seed-umbrella’d scienceblogs, plus Scott Aaronson’s “Shtetl-Optmized” and Peter Woit’s “Not Even Wrong” and Terry Tao’s “What’s New.”
I learned blog etiquette (perhaps too little, too late) from slashdot, boingboing, and “Making Light.”
My conjecture is that: in this 21st century Age of Wiki-science, the blog as collaborationware is both medium and message.