Science, blogs and web 2.0

Couple of interesting articles picked up by way of the New Scientist technology blog, one showing that Instant Messaging is increasingly important for brainstorming between researchers who are online, and one from Nature claiming to show that scientists are on the whole not that interested in blogging, for a number of reasons, including that blogs don't count for citation purposes and the lurking fear that someone might get a march on your ideas as you are developing and discussing them, in the main as you can't control whom you communicate with.

This would be a concern for our development of a collaboration space based on Sakai, but it's really only designed to get rid of the tyrrany of timezones and have people work on joint documents within a closed space, so it becomes an internal discussion forum for a closed research group, ie a way of exchanging and editing drafts of a paper rather releasing works in progress to the world