Does publishing one's thoughts on the web count towards tenure? Probably not, but it has landed six Nature Network bloggers in the 2008 Open Laboratory anthology of best science blog posts (see the winning posts at http://tinyurl.com/7pze3d).

Not surprisingly, four of the six winning posts are woven around issues of how science intersects with the media and how Internet-based new media are changing the ways in which scientists exchange data and ideas.

A blogger going by the pen name Charles Darwin bemoans the media's bias towards macroscience — literally, big science — in the headlines. Jennifer Rohn imaginatively ponders “what the world would be like if science were put under the same media scrutiny as sport”. Richard Grant, who can remember the 'days before e-mail', dissects whether scientific collaboration using Web 2.0, or “any kind of WWW-based meeting place” will become as second-nature as e-mail. And Noah Gray argues that mobile-phone camera-snapping actually degrades the usual exchanges meant to take place at poster sessions.