Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Physics blogging ...


Sean Carroll of Cosmic Variance ("the world’s most popular physics blog") writes about being "a physicist and blogger":

Among blogs with some sort of physics focus, we are the largest on the Internet – and by various measures we are about the 1000th largest blog of any sort. On a typical day the site gets about 3000 visits, which is a tiny number compared to the 100,000 or more hits of the largest political and technology blogs but still much greater than the number of people who attend a public talk or read my cosmology papers in Phys. Rev. D.

This paragraph is worth quoting too:

The mixture of informality and expertise is one of the key strengths of blogging because it lowers the barriers between scientists and the public. But it also contributes to the suspicions of those who simply do not “get it”. Distracted by the tendency of many bloggers to post pictures of their cats or to indulge in occasional invective, some physicists think of blogs as little more than 21st-century personal diaries. They miss the greater potential for a uniquely interactive and cross- or even extra-disciplinary discussion.

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