Some new additions to the physics blogroll:
1) Not all that new, but I keep forgetting to post a link: Clifford Johnson has spun off Asymptotia from Cosmic Variance, to house his own brand of bike-riding, concert-going, vegetable-buying physics blogging. If you read Clifford’s stuff at Cosmic Variance, you know what you’re getting. If you haven’t read his stuff, well, go check it out.
2) A new group blog: The n-category Cafe, featuring John Baez, David Corfield and Urs Schreiber. It’s a little tough to say what this will really be about, since they only have two posts up, but they all have their own bloggy histories, so you can probably reconstruct it from that.
The combination of these two items does raise an interesting question, though. I mean, on the one hand, we have Clifford splitting off from a group blog, while on the other, we’ve got the formation of a new group blog. The question is, which of these represents the future of the blogosphere? Will physicists continue to coalesce into bigger and bigger group blogs (making Clifford into the Hawking radiation of blogdom), or are we going to approach equlibirum, with as many people leaving group blogs as there are people starting them.
I think we need to get some people working on this critical problem, as it has important implications for the future history of the entire blogosphere. Maybe we can get the Templeton Foundation to give us a grant…
The key feature of science writing of any sort is credibility. In journals, the question of whether you “know your stuff” sufficiently to be credible is decided by peer review; in less formal contexts such as lectures and newspaper articles, it’s determined by the leveraging of pre-existing academic qualifications (which in turn are based on a rough-and-ready peer-review of scientists by those who know them in a professional context).
I think we’re seeing the growth of a new credibility allocation system. Again, it will be initialised by pre-existing qualifications, but will increasingly break off from the formal academic hierarchy and become oriented around other experts’ perception of your work. Credentials will only be important if there’s a sufficiently nasty dispute between community members over issues of accuracy and misrepresentation.
In this way even laymen will be able to get in on the act, providing a smoother transition and increased idea flow between academia and the mundane world. Quite simply, every time you endorse a post on someone else’s blog you share a little of your credibility with them.
In this context, the science conglomerates such as ScienceBlogs, GNXP and Cosmic Variance are small-scale formalisations of this system. If an author is publishing on ScienceBlogs, they have the implicit endorsement of all the other posters. If they were a complete crank, the other posters would get together to have them thrown out.
It won’t be necessary to join one of these (and in fact that would result in a completely stagnant system), but it means that your readers don’t have to waste time checking that you’re not a crank. That work has already been done for them, by a system that’s relatively immune to corruption.
Dr. Schund helped found The Institute for Institutional Studies. Its motto: “The answer lies within.” Think of it as a French-Latin dieu-dieu ex machina. After we establish dialectic, isn’t basis then redundant? More studies are needed!
Uh, gardening. You forgot gardening. 🙂
Oh, and cooking. And needlework. Mustn’t forget needlework…
-cvj