Nature's Science Bloggers

Again, this is another post that I meant to write a while back and it's a rant that's not about New Zealand. About two months ago, Nature published a list of the top 50 science blogs. The rankings were based on their Technorati ranking and were required to be written by a practicing scientist. I followed all 50 blogs using an RSS feed reader, Newsgator. (RSS readers and social bookmarking sites, such as del.icio.us, are the biggest improvements to the web since Google.)

I was disappointed by the quality of most of the science blogs. Most were about the scientist's cats or regurgitations of The Panda's Thumb or Pharyngula. My criterion for judging is solely focus. From BlogPire's success, I extrapolate that focus is what separates the good from the bad. Here's my list of the 13 most useless of Nature's top 50 science blogs in alphabetical order.

• A Blog Around the Clock
  
• A Questionable Authority
  
• blog.bioethics.net
  
• Deltoid
  
• Living the Scientific Life
  
• Mike the Mad Biologist
  
• Stranger Fruit
  
• The Daily Transcript
  
• The Disgruntled Chemist
  
• The Quantum Pontiff
  
• Thoughts from Kansas
  
• Three-Toed Sloth
  
• Uncertain Principles
  

I feel that some of these might not be on Nature's list. Oh well, no time to check. I'm politically aligned with most of these blogs, but there're better political blogs out there, Think Progress for one.

Two science blogs stood out from the rest.

• Good Math, Bad Math
  
• John Hawks Anthropology Weblog
  

Signing off from the 1.6 millionth most rambling blog.