Blog planets are like conferences… (aka R-bloggers.com)

Blog planets are websites that aggregate blog feeds around a particular topic or project. It is probably called after one of its first implementations, the Planet software. These planets are like conferences, rather than journals. Like conferences with a continuously ongoing year-around poster session. And like any good scientists you blog (read: present posters) and you join blog planets (read: present your poster at conferences). The reality is that many of our peers are afraid of presenting posters at conferences (read: they are afraid of blogging).

This week my blog got accepted (read: I submitted an abstract which was reviewed and accepted) to R-bloggers.com. I do not present all my posters at this venue, and use labels to identify which posters go to this meeting. For this planet, those are labeled R. And unlike other virtual worlds, these virtual conferences venues (read: a web site) are easy to reschedule. With a simple click I switch from today’s floor (read: a web page) to a room dedicated to me (read: another web page).



There are many other of these conference I attend, including Planet CDK, Planet Bioclipse, Chemical blogspace (quite general topic: chemistry, but with sessions on many topics, like cheminformatics), Planet Eclipse, Planet RDF, Nature.com Blogs (very general too, but also with dedicated floors, like chemistry) and a few more I cannot think of right now. In science such planets do not exist in this form, really, The closest things are blog service providers, like Science 3.0. I guess these are like conferences for general sciences, where you’re kind of lost in which corner you really belong, and you cling on to a few bloggers (read: colleagues) whose work (read: posters) you know you’ll probably like.

Which conferences do you visit with your posters?