Like many awesome internet phenomena, blogging started in the late nineties. Nature authors and editors recognized the effort early. In 2006 there were already more than 45 million blogs, and at least 50 science blogs made it in the top 50,000 and 5 in the top 3,500.

I started blogging in 2005, around the time many others did, among which many chemists. in 2006 I started a website called Chemical blogspace using the Postgenomic.com software. Chemical blogspace extracted which journal articles were discussed (yeah, there is a causal relationship with altmetrics!), and I added recognition of chemicals, so that you could follow blog posts talking about a specific chemical. I visited Euan Adie and others in 2007. I had to sunset Chemical blogspace several years later, in a time where blogging seems to be on its return, overtaken by microblogging platforms like Twitter (which died in 2022).

We know now that it didn’t really go away, however. If we look at Rogue Scholar we see there is plenty of activity, indeed. I am very interested in restarting something like Chemical blogspace, based on Rogue Scholar. The nice things of Chemical blogspace was that it created a virtual community, and in the end it aggregated and indexed more than 250 chemistry blogs. I would love to see many of them archived on Rogue Scholar, but the blog authors have to recommend their blog personally here.

You can also just visit many of these blogs to relive the dynamics at the time:

A lot has happened since then. There are new platforms. Blogger and Wordpress are still the bigger platform, but Hugo, Jekyll, and Quarto are modern, open source alternatives. Markdown may have helped with the revival of blogging, making it easier than ever.

What is your current favorite chemistry blog? Love to hear from you!