Is blogging on science useful?

Doing science requires many attributes in addition to curiosity, especially since it has become so inter-disciplinary. Gone are the days when science was restricted to a royal few or gifted individuals who had the knack of putting thoughts into records or print before they experimented. World is a global village now. Science is connected more effectively with scientists all over the world after the invention of WWW and of course, Google!

I was just thinking how blogging could be a useful utility for scientist... I guess I ended up thinking only about useful aspects of blogging that would run into pages! Thoughts travel faster than the speed of light, if only I can measure. But I'm sure my thoughts can reach some scientist at least in seconds if only the scientist at the other end has access to internet. My hypotheses, abstract musings, enthusiastic questions etc can all be read, reviewed, openly criticized and refined only through this wonderful open access but underutilized(by scientists) phenomenon called 'Blogging'.

I don't have to be a Shakespeare and Einstein at the same time to worry about my abstract scientific thoughts into readable English in a blog. In fact, I can convey what I want to convy in a much more casual way and yet get benefited with a thorough scrutiny by those who read it. I see blogging to be the starting point of a budding researcher's venture into writing for peer-reviewed journals. Above all, blogging makes me not worry about impact factors!!

I was forced to blog about my thoughts on blogging and science primarily because I saw only names in contributors' list but the actual contribution is only from a few! So, let us shun fears of presenting good English, Newtonian science and hesitation and start blogging about science in the true sense without any inhibitions, with just curiosity on mind! If some one is going to suggest time as an excuse, please take a 'time loan' from Facebook or Orkut or Twitter or any of those chat mechanisms that distract. Waiting to see you all blogging on science, because blogging is also a way expand one's scientific acumen.