Notes on a year in blogging

First, a little history about this blog - there's some comments from annual review below:

I was first exposed to world of blogging during my final year at university when a lecturer in a human genetics module suggested we took a look at one particular post regarding the sequencing of a genome belonging to an ancient human. This piece of writing was informative, entertaining and extremely relevant to what we were studying. This was a post on Ed Yong's, Not Exactly Rocket Science blog and it probably first set me off on wanting to write about science.

Mendeley Virology group

Mendeley - (get it here) the relatively recently released .pdf manager for both desktop and onlin archiving also allows you to start online social groups where any participant can upload a paper or a link to be viewed by anyone else (see their blog post).

Obviously, you can see how this could vastly speed up the transmission of new ideas around the world via this kind of global scientist (and non-scientist alike) network. But what it also lets you do is comment - and discuss -  the paper or even just update each other on how they are getting on.

For example: see the synthetic biology group

The ability for anyone (provided you sign-up to Mendeley, which is very easy, fast and extremely useful) to rapidly upload scientific papers may allow for greater understanding, post-peer review discussion of papers and the ability to generate a 'community-driven' bank of literature on a particular subject. It is also a great way to collaborate scientifically on a project.


So, lets see how it works for virology, join the Mendeley group (link to the right of my blog). Upload a paper and comment on it.

Molecular virology is a group in Biological Sciences on Mendeley.