Scientific meetings need more bloggers

In one of my first blog posts (before I joined Nature Network) about a year ago I wrote about the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) 2007 Meeting. I was surprised that only a handful of blogs reported about the event, one of the largest and most important meetings for clinical cancer research.

One would think that blogging and scientific meetings would be a natural combination. Those that can't go to a meeting need a filtered summary, and a blogging scientist would be a perfect person for the job. The experience with blog posts about technology meetings also says that this should work. In the Field is Nature's blog about conferences and events and there is the occasional blog post about a meeting.

So why are there not more bloggers at science meetings? I think that this is simply a problem of critical mass. 1) there are still not enough science bloggers around and 2) most science blogs (including this one) don't write about research results, but rather about other aspects of science. This could well change in a few years and I expect to see an increasing number of science blogs reporting from meetings. And I will try to blog about the most interesting sessions in the fields of leukemia and lymphoma when I go to ASCO 2008 in Chicago at the end of the month.