The Guardian runs an interesting ‘”Writer’s Rooms” feature in its Review section every Saturday in which a writer (or sometimes an artist) discusses a photograph of their office or workroom, pointing out significant objects. The idea (as in Desert Island Discs) is to gain an oblique insight into the subject’s mindset. Well, it’s hardly an original idea but wouldn’t be interesting to take the same approach with scientists?

It looks like SciBlog08 was very much ahead of the curve in issuing the call for more scientists to get involved in blogging. A former student (thanks Ananyo) has just drawn my attention to an open access article on science blogging that has appeared in this month’s PLOS Biology.

My resemblance to Blanche DuBois has not been remarked on before but last Wednesday evening it was unmistakeable. There I was travelling on the tube to the TalkScience event at the British Library when, like Tennessee Williams’ fateful Southern belle, I found myself entirely dependent on the kindness of strangers. Still recovering from a cold, I was suddenly overcome by a severe coughing fit.

I have been thinking about this for a quite while, but finally got a kick up the backside. And now it’s done. With two members of my group I’ve put together a short movie on our research and, thanks to the good folks at Nature Network who enabled video embedding just last week, it is presented here for your… delectation? What can I tell you?

In my last post I tried to elucidate the classy and artful double-entendre title of this blog. My Reciprocal Space , I explained, is a place for exchange, but the name also belies a play on words that invokes the peculiar mathematical construct used to interpret the X-ray diffraction patterns from crystalline samples.

It’s the name of this blog. But why? Well, in Web2.0-land, a blog (can you hear my teeth grinding?) is quintessentially a space for the reciprocation of views, the exchange of ideas. So far, so good, but the title is also a rather cheesy crystallographic pun because reciprocal space is a real thing.

Attending the SciBlog 2008 conference last week gave me a chance to weigh up my opinion of blogs, bloggers and blogging. And I’ve decided that I hate them all. Not the concept or the people or the activity, you understand, but the words. They stick in my throat. As I would have said when I was growing up in Northern Ireland, they make me want to boke . I know the etymology: web-log, b-log, blog.