If a cornerstone of the Web 2.0 meme is the web as a global, collaborative environment, how is this being put to use in perhaps the most global and collaborative of all human endeavors: scientific research? An irony often observed by those of us working in science communication is the fact that, although the web was originally invented as means for sharing scientific information,⁴ scientists have been relatively slow to fully embrace its potential. Blogging, for example, has become undeniably mainstream, with the number of bloggers somewhere in the high tens of millions⁵ (among a billion or so web users⁶). Yet among a few million scientists worldwide, only perhaps one or two thousand are blogging, at least about science,⁷⁸ and most of these are relatively young. By contrast, academic economists,⁹ for example, even very distinguished ones, seem to have embraced this new medium more enthusiastically.

Scientific blogging is still a niche activity, and what data there are suggest that it is not yet growing fast. For example, Alexa reports¹⁰ that ScienceBlogs,¹¹ where many of the most prominent scientist-bloggers post their thoughts, has shown little traffic growth over the last twelve months, and the scientific blog tracking service Postgenomic.com¹² (created by an employee of Nature Publishing Group) shows the volume of posts from the blog in its index holding still at about 2,500 posts a week.¹³ Similarly, scientists appear reluctant to comment publicly on research papers.¹⁴¹⁵ The blogging bug, it seems, has yet to penetrate the scientific citadel. This is a shame because blogs are a particularly effective means for one-to-many and many-to-many communication, and science no less than other spheres stands to gain from its judicious adoption.

Yet the participative web is about much more than blogging and commenting. Figure 1 below summarizes the manifold types of social software that exist online, all of them relevant in some way to scientific research.