Blogging research thoughts and outcomes to me at least seems the most natural thing in the world, after all the current buzz around Universities is outreach and breaking down silos. As such Web 2.0 with its shared videos via services such as YouTube, its virtual environments ala Second Life and real-time research updates via Twitter have all been welcomed and indeed become central to my work. The embracing of Web 2.0 by academics is not however universal and by many it can be viewed as trivialising research.

A tricky topic for my first blog post on the Nature Network but one on an issue which is becoming increasingly important. To take a moment to introduce myself – I run the Digital Urban blog at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), a blog that discusses and provides tutorials on how to visualize cities and city based datasets using web-based technologies. The latest work is taking place on Second Nature Island in Second Life, creating ‘Urban Spheres’ into which avatars can step inside and view high definition examples of local environments:

The work is used by schools, colleges and professionals for communicating urban form and as such the blog provides a way to move the research out of the lab. Yet in the world of social science I have come up against a lot of resistance and sometimes mirth at my blogging activities. Indeed one colleague at a recent conference suggested that I had given up academia for the last year because I run a blog.

So blogging is a tricky line to take, if even those involved in internet based technologies frown upon virtual worlds and blogging then what hope is there for the rest of the academic community? I would be interested to know if any readers have set up a blog with regular updates on their research and if so what the feedback has been like from fellow academics?

Indeed, it is not as if blogging replaces traditional serious academic papers, it is merely a way to communicate and outreach the latest research. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be writing on various aspects of the research at CASA as well as thoughts and tips on running a scientific blog. My advice – if your at a conference and people ask for suggestions on how to collaborate on papers or outreach the research just don’t mention Second Life or heavens forbid Twitter.