Science Library Pad: science blogging, with extra physics flavour

The communication of physics used to happen mainly through emails and faxed or mailed preprints.
I suspect it still happens mostly through emails, emailed documents, and downloaded preprints.

There was some discussion on USENET, e.g. one could make postings like

Newsgroups: sci.physics
From: (Richard Akerman)
Date: Wed, 18 Nov 1992 21:21:15 GMT
Local: Wed, Nov 18 1992 9:21 pm
Subject: Do pions mediate strong force between nucleons?

Like the subject says, is it correct that pions mediate the strong force
BETWEEN nucleons (quark confinement preventing gluons from mediating it
themselves).

and actually expect to get a good response. Or as another example, someone could ask about the Tunguska Event and get a tolerable mix of on-topic and off-topic responses.

So it's not surprising that blogs would continue this trend of electronic discussions.
Portals and KM blog reports on Science Blogs and Science Library Blogs

Garrett Eastman [of the Rowland Institute Library Blog at Harvard] gave a very useful presentation at the Berkman Thursday blog group on Science Blogs and Science Library Blogs. He said that there are still relatively few.

Some listed:

organizations - http://bioinformatics.org/
individual scientists - In The Pipeline by Derek Lowe
science journalists - Chris C. Mooney
groups/labs - http://tangledbank.net/

The Portals and KM posting also pointed me to an article I hadn't seen, from Seed magazine, Oct/Nov 2005 - Blogs: A New Force in Physics?

A quick search shows that physics blogs are twice as numerous as either chemistry or biology ones (though Pharyngula.org, a biology site, is arguably the most visited of all). And physics blogs, in particular, are democratizing the process of scientific research, providing equal access to everyone from amateur enthusiasts to grad students and Nobel Prize winners, helping to sharpen debates. Sites like CosmicVariance.com, QuantumDiaries.org, and The String Coffee Table—group blogs by physicists posting from conferences, summer schools, lecture halls and cafés around the world—are further leveling the intellectual playing field. ArXiv.org (pronounced “archive”), which has provided unfettered access to the latest physics research for almost 15 years, now links directly to the blogs where discussions of papers are taking place. Commenting on the function of blogging scientific gossip, Sean Carrol, one of the main contributors to Cosmic Variance says, “blogs are a great way both to spread accurate information and to prevent inaccurate information from hardening into accepted wisdom.”

One of the most notorious physics blogs is Peter Woit’s Not Even Wrong—the first site this summer to discuss the gravity wave experiment.

Christina Pikas comments that

I have to differ with Garrett on the lack of science blogs... while this is certainly true about life science blogs, the physics blogosphere seems pretty vibrant. String theorists alone have quite a few blogs. One collection of physics blogs is: Mixed States, http://somethingsimilar.com/planet/mixed_states/

I also discovered that Declan Butler has a blog (he wrote one of the Nature "Science in the web age" articles).

There are some more things going on in life science, here are a couple:

http://www.siphs.com/ - Siphs is a peer enabled search engine and online reference for the life sciences research community.
lots of blogs in this space, with varying degrees of commerciality/ads e.g. http://www.biotech-weblog.com/

Follow more threads (getting into more controversial areas e.g. science blogs as battle against misinformation):