Science in the Triangle

The credibility of science blogging is getting much scrutiny at the ScienceOnline 2011 conference, which is under way in North Carolina’s Research Triangle Park.

Two sessions on Saturday and one on Sunday addressed the quality of online science writing and ethics standards. Two touched on the fact that while blogs are rarely edited, posts published on them can be difficult to distinguish from edited content published in magazines and newspapers and without an editor, mistakes and sloppiness can happen. In the third session, journalistic standards of separating advertisement and content took center stage.

Virginia Hughes, the former community manager of ScienceBlogs and a panelist in the “Science Journalism Online: Better, or Merely Different” session, suggested labeling blogs. Ed Yong, a blogger for Discover Magazine and a panelist at the “Blogs, Bloggers and Boundaries?” session, said a blogger writing for a larger audience encounters more boundaries to get scientific information across and standards help to break down those boundaries.

OK. So what if there was a rating system for blogs, sort of a Good Blogging seal of approval to attract a wider, more general audience from traditional media - particularly from the many regional newspapers that have eliminated local science reporting. What if such a rating system would clearly identify blogs and rate how credible their information is?

The first question that arises is who would define the standards. The second question is who would apply them. Once both questions are answered, science blogging may be more defined, but it would also lose some of the vibrancy that comes from the freedom of not having an editor, of being able to write about the most obscure or the most mundane in any conceivable format.

Technology allows everybody to blog, to say his or her piece without having to pay printing costs. This offers the opportunity to depose authorities who speak from up high.

Sure, some blog posts will be inscrutable, wrong or wrong-headed. But others will be fantastic experiments of creativity. Some of them may even lead us to a way to write about science and make a living doing it.

It is premature to want to define science blogging while the future of online communication is far from clear.

Online science writing must remain as big a tent as possible, avoid institutionalization and leave judgment calls about quality and credibility to the audience.

What would help the audience do that, is more transparency - who the blogger is, where he or she is coming from, links to sources and disclosures of potential conflicts of interest.