The potential for blogs and other new forms of communication to reshape the media landscape has almost certainly been oversold, but there's one corner of the landscape that has been transformed by blogging: scientific communications. As science blogs have grown in number and credibility, their ability to take scientific results directly to the public has changed the dynamics of science reporting—scientists who blog are some of the regular media's fiercest critics, and provide an alternate, often more nuanced take on the latest scientific findings.

But, given the growth in popularity and credibility, it was inevitable that someone would try to cash in on science blogging. That someone turned out to be Pepsi, which cut a deal with a major science blogging platform that ultimately led to a full scale exodus and questions about whether providing science bloggers a platform made any sense.

Changing the landscape

In the past, even when scientists communicated directly with the public, it generally came in the form of edited, scripted works like books, television specials, and the like. In contrast, science blogs let scientists communicate directly with the public, providing detailed dissections of the literature, informal thoughts on their own work, corrections to inaccurate press reports, and ruminations on the aspects of a scientific life that don't make TV specials, like stresses over funding and tenure.

Science blogs seemed be one of the few cases where the new medium was really was changing how communications works.

ScienceBlogs was one of the earliest and most successful attempts to give bloggers a platform. Instead of setting up a server or getting lost in sea of blogs on one of the major services, it offered science bloggers a community, promotion, and the chance to leave the technical worries to someone else. In return, the bloggers offered the platform owner publicity and traffic.

So, for example, ScienceBlogs was run by Seed Media, and used to provide some publicity for its now-defunct Seed Magazine; it has also licensed ScienceBlogs for use in other countries. In a similar way, Nature Publishing Group hosts a blog platform that helps keep scientists on its property even when they're not browsing the scientific literature; other platforms also exist for an overlapping set of reasons.

For the most part, this symbiotic setup worked smoothly, although there were some hitches. Most of the networks were invite-only, and exercised a modicum of control over the content they hosted, giving them an air of exclusiveness. Some of the communities acted a bit more like dysfunctional families, with public spats breaking out on a semi-regular basis. This last bit was an outgrowth of the fact that some of the content wasn't so much science blogging as a blog by a scientist, where they engaged in personal campaigns for things like atheism and public health with varying degrees of aggressiveness.

With time, the (possibly) unexpected happened at Science Blogs: the quality of the science writing by many of its members gradually made it a credible source of science news. Not every post was good, or even about science, but you could generally trust the ones that were good to be very accurate and, collectively, the bloggers provided a steady output of high-quality material. Traditional science journalists, including book and magazine authors, saw the quality and hopped on board. New media really did seem to be changing science communications.

Along came Pepsi

It didn't last. ScienceBlogs decided to host blogs run by the press offices of some major research institutions, like Brookhaven National Labs. Although the material from Brookhaven and the others is generally excellent, the decision suggested that Seed had a somewhat loose attitude towards the separation of promotional and news material in comparison with many traditional media outlets. Things got looser still when ScienceBlogs started a food and nutrition blog run by Pepsi, but failed to provide any indication of the commercial interests behind it.

Most of the traditional journalists, sensing the obvious attempt by Seed to cash in on their credibility, quickly quit (David Dobbs provided an excellent explanation as to why). Over the next few days, some of the scientists also left, some of them voicing more general discontent about neglected IT and other management issues. A number of the remainders went on strike. People on competing sites questioned the value of platforms, and a few of them left, too. For a brief moment, platforms and their collective credibility and impact looked to have been a passing phase.

But that hasn't happened. A number of the people who left still saw the value of platforms, and formed a collective to create one of their own, Scientopia. And there appears to be at least two commercial interests that are considering forming new science blogging platforms (whether this interest predates the ScienceBlogs implosion isn't clear). Regardless of the tensions highlighted by the ScienceBlogs implosion, commercial interests still see potential value in it, and bloggers continue to see the value of having a collective voice and a platform.

If anything, the events have raised the profile of science blogging. Newsweek ran an excellent analysis of the situation. Another, far less excellent consideration of science blogging ran in the The New York Times Magazine. Despite some significant misunderstandings (the author highlighted a climate denialist blog as a quality source of information, for example), it sparked some good online discussions and probably raised awareness of the medium among an audience that might not otherwise stumble across it.

All of this suggests that science blogs have become a permanent part of the media landscape, and a significant outlet for scientific communications. But the growing desire to play host to them undoubtedly reflects a desire to make money off their credibility and value, which seems likely to produce another Pepsi-scale fiasco.