The role of blogging in Biology – Biogging

Blogging is the “in-thing” for the present generation and will probably continue to be one of the most popular form of sharing knowledge, experience, information with a personalized approach. Blogposts can be just de facto or de jure, what one felt that day or what interesting one learnt, what one wants to do or how one should do. We can broadly categorize blogs into “Strategic” and “random” blogs. Here, I wish to discuss how strategic sharing of biological information, approaches, theories, beliefs and even speculations, are providing a niche for accelerated spread of knowledge. QUESTION: have biologists actually taken up the electronic sharing system seriously. ANSWER - “yes” and India is an active participant in biology related searches on Google. 

The tabular representation of google search trend for keyword “biology” shows India being at the second position (Trend 1). If this is HOT, let me now tell you what is HAPPENING. India holds the first place when it comes to google searches for “Bioinformatics” (Trend 2), with cities like Hyderabad, Chennai, Mumbai, Delhi etc occupying top seats on the global scale. Now if there is a demand for knowledge on Biology and bioinformatics, following the quote “Necessity is the mother of inventions”, resources will be created. There have been many instances where I have been benefited by blogs for example, I was facing issues during installation of double precision MPI-enabled version of Gromacs on Linux. I found a very comprehensive and “easy –to-understand” blog (which has now been converted to a website- www.somewhereville.com). There I amny blogs which I personally admire following. One of them being http://rosettadesigngroup.com/blog/ and http://practicalfragments.blogspot.com/. It is fun, educative and mind intriguing. There is one very important aspect of blogging, you SHARE knowledge – not only Impart. I personally feel this bidirectional traffic of knowledge and opinion is really exciting. The best part is you can communicate with people you hardly know and are geographically miles and miles away for you and there is a community following your discussions which minimizes the chances of channelization ofwrong knowledge. To wrap up - We are really fortunate of being able to write and share our views as free lancers. But this freedom of writing comes with responsibility to convey what is right. I really feel strategic blogging is crucial for Biology and its time to roll up your sleeves to participate in “Biogging”.