Things 1 and 2 - useful blogs

Thing 1 was to create this blog - I can tick that off my list!

Thing 2 is to come up with an example of a blog that a researcher, academic, student or clinician might use.

I carried out a search on Google Blog Search and on Technorati (don't get so many hits here). It was quite easy to identify blogs that researchers, clinicians, etc. in biomedicine or health might want to follow to keep up to date with developments in their field. Some examples I found include:

MRC News - this blog is integrated into their webpage and is to distribute MRC news
BMJ Blogs - The BMJ hosts a wide range of blogs. Many are connected to particular BMJ journals but the Doc2Doc blogs include a news blogs and open blogs for doctors or medical students to post comments on anything they wish.

It was harder trying to find examples of blogs created by researchers or clinicians to assist them with their work or research. Perhaps these personal blogs are not as well indexed, or have strange titles which makes them harder to find? Or perhaps biomedical researchers don't want to share their findings too soon on a publicly available page as it could have implications for malpractice or effect patient care? Maybe in other disciplines you want to show you are the first to discover something, eg. in Maths, where something is either right or wrong. Perhaps in the biomedical or health context you need to keep things under wraps until you have enough evidence.

The best example I found was not from the UK, but was from a statistical genetics research group at Colombia University, StatGene Research Group Blog. This is a great example, I think, as they use the blog in a number of ways: to share information about new papers that have come out, to document their meetings and to summarise progress on their work Apart from one recent entry they haven't been very active on the blog for a couple of years.

Other examples include blogs by individuals, such as an academic at Oxford University, who seems to primarily use the blog to promote his publications and activities such as conference presentations,  and a PhD student at Imperial who uses it as a tool for self-reflection.

I also found an example of a Wordpress blog being used by a research group, the Clinical and Biomedical Computing Unit - Research, to create a website rather than making use of the interactivity of a blog.

I'm looking forward to seeing the examples that everyone else comes up with!