Katherine Sharpe, Seed magazine’s manager of ScienceBlogs provided an insight into how the blog aggregator works at the Knight science journalism conference.

ScienceBlogs kicked off in January 2006 with 12 blogs and now, two years later, brings together 70. Katherine explained how Seed quickly realised that bringing the blogs together into a science metablog created something bigger than the sum of its parts and the traffic reflected this.

The posts are not filtered by site editors. Every blogger is free to write whatever they want. Seed has only kicked off one blogger and that was for copying a lot material from other sites.

There is a strong, educational motivation to the blogs. Katherine said the bloggers were excited about communicating science to the public, especially to combat misinformation.

The blogging, though is largely opinion-driven, often by people with an expertise in an area. So it is not what many would consider objective journalism, but then, it is not intended to be.

Interestingly, the blogs also performed a social function, with people blogging to reach out to like-minded scientists and readers. They also get some money from Seed based on traffic to individual blogs. The rate is $25 for 10,000 visits.

ScienceBlogs may be a product of Seed magazine, but the two services have very different audiences. Katherine said there was little overlap, with the magazine and the metablog only sharing about 10% of readers.

Her explanation – blog readers are looking for inside information, with niche interests, and often want to argue and leave comments.

It shows how ScienceBlogs can complement the more traditional work of Seed magazine, reaching new audiences and offer new ways of engaging with science.

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