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Blogo-representation of biomedicine and the life sciences

The postgenomic.com blog is a brand new addition to the growing number of meta-blog tools — like technorati, but specializing in biomedicine and the life sciences. The blog aggregates posts from (presently some 100) life science and biomedicine blogs and uses data from these blogs to do several things. Says the owner: “For example, it […]

The postgenomic.com blog is a brand new addition to the growing number of meta-blog tools — like technorati, but specializing in biomedicine and the life sciences. The blog aggregates posts from (presently some 100) life science and biomedicine blogs and uses data from these blogs to do several things.

Says the owner:

“For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of which web sites are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often by bioinformaticians, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently by evolutionary biologists. It’s sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community.”

This makes postgenomic.com a potentially interesting tool for mapping trends in biomedical discourse. But the goal is not around the corner. True, I found the current list of life science and biomedicine blogs quite useful (the list will probably grow rapidly), but the paper and conference review functions are rudimentary (after all it has only been in use for 48 hours), and the Zeitgeist function is not very informative. However, it started last Thursday, it’s a beta-version and much more remains to be done functionwise. It’s a pretty good idea and it may have some potential as a mapping tool, especially when the life science and biomedicine sector of the blogosphere starts to expand. So keep it under surveillance …
See the owner’s (“Stew”, an anonymous bioinformatician in his late 20’s working in a UK university) description of the postgenomc.com service here.
(thanks to Erik Stattin for making me aware of postgenomic.com)