Jon Udell observes that communication in science is still predominantly off-line or private (access restricted journals, and email).
Beyond the computer-science-related disciplines, though, it's unclear to me how much scientific content is becoming freely available online, and therefore able to benefit from the powerful knowledge-transmission and reputation-building forces at work in the blogosphere.
One of the problems here is that academics who are not working in computer science (and no doubt some who are) are not aware of the tools, and haven't thought about what better tools could do. And I am finding, as I periodically try to do something about this, that there are very good reasons for this situation. There is still way too much expertise needed to get things set up and working smoothly enough that you can go to a busy academic and present them with a compelling proposition for investing time in learning the tools.
In the case of weblogs, and some recent introductions to the concepts and technology notwithstanding, there's still a huge barrier to entry in just explaining enough of the concepts for anyone other than a relentless self-publicist to see the value of learning.
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