Not long ago a feature article Surfing Web2O did a full survey on the state of the Web 2.0 culture in the academia. I have also written quite some words on chemblogs (but the feature article had a better round-bottom flask of Web 2.0 solution than my post had). One of the problems concerned is the lack of blogging professors in the scientific blogosphere, as mentioned in the feature article:

The blogosphere has a loyal following, but few chemistry professors write blogs; most authors are graduate students or postdocs. As Open Chemistry supporter Steve Bachrach explained about a year ago when interviewed for web-based chemistry magazine, Reactive Reports: ‘I don’t have the time to read random thoughts by random individuals. I barely have time to keep up with the traditional literature in my field. The blogosphere just seemed to me to be filled with the rantings of people who have nothing better to do with their time.’ Though there is some information to be found, Bachrach now concedes, he still contests that most chemistry blogs have little content in them useful to the busy researcher.

While many post for fun and interest, riffing around the culture of lab-based chemistry, blogs such as Paul Docherty’s Totally Synthetic provide useful summaries of the latest organic syntheses, effectively acting as global online journal clubs where researchers all over the world chip in with constructive criticism. As blogger Andrew Sun argues, the blogosphere’s content is a product of its authors, and it would surely change if more chemistry professors bothered to blog – as happens, to an extent, in other sciences.

Recently I joined a growing community of blogging professors in my country on sciencenet.cn (no English version). It is managed by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and run by the Science Times Press, China. Unlike a ‘bottom-up’ development of science bloggers which consists of many graduate students, as is the case in ‘the west’, the ‘top-down’ establishment of this Chinese blog space has gathered quite a group of scientists registered as users. Most of the bloggers are quite active. From the bloggers list you can even recognize some big guys in the ‘serious’ science community:

• Miao Li, theoretical physicist. He is the pioneer of Chinese science bloggers. His started his main blog since 2005 based on a Wordpress system. Now the number of comments can easily reach over 100 per post. His blog on sciencenet.cn is a duplication of his main one. He is good at explaining string theory in a lay man’s language.
• Wang Hongfei, physical chemists, leading researcher of interfacial analysis via nonlinear spectroscopic methods, esp. Second Harmonic Generation (SHG) and Sum Frequency Generation (SFG). His posts are quite irritant but always disclosing the dark side of our educational infrastructure, and controversies are quite heated in the comment fields.
• Yu-Chi Ho, applied mathematician, Gordon McKay Professor of Systems Engineering. His blog is in English.
• Zhi-Zhong Xing, theoretical physicist. Keywords of his research includes: Fermion Mass Problem / Flavor Mixing / CP Violation / B-meson Physics / Charm Physics / Neutrino Physics. He had earlier been maintaining a blog on typad.com called Quantum Diary for a whole year of 2005 to celebrate the World Year of Physics.
• Jin Meng, natural historian, associate curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Field of interest: Craniodental Morphology and Systematics of Didymoconidae (Insectivora, Mammalia).

Some bloggers come from abroad and contribute to Chinese science, like Sharon Ruwart, Managing Director of Elsevier Science & Technology China. And there is a scientist blogger outside sciencenet.cn, Wei Yu, former vice minister of the Ministry of Education.

But what do they blog about? As a rule, ‘professors don’t blog about their research’. But they participate actively in the discussion of the public events such as the recent ‘tiger’ issue, and the constant controversy of the essence of science, science fund endorsement, and the relationship between graduate students and their mentors. They also blog about their spiritual lives with music and literature. They have a stable community of readers. Some readers are from the ‘lay man world’ and do show some misunderstanding of science. This is a good sign.

Earlier this year and Corie sent me some flyers to distribute among my colleagues. She said Nature Network was going to open a new hub for China. But I thought this is quite difficult because there’s few science bloggers in China, esp. in a foreign language. Now I’m considering that NN may contact sciencenet.cn for cooperation for a new hub on NN and all the China sections on nature.com including Nature China. Sciencenet.cn has a stable online community of Chinese scientists and advantage in language, but it is using an ugly server system. Obviously it is not professional in Web 2.0 system, which NN could help about.