Know why BetaMax didn't beat out VCRs even though it was better in every way?   The same reason more people have PCs than Apples.   Strangling the technology with one provider keeps the market small and when a flexible alternative comes out, people flock to it.

So it has gone with group science blogging.   There is one large successful platform, Scienceblogs.com, and one trying to gain ground, Discover blogs, but the market never really took off.   Detractors pointed to the more militant cultural and political kookiness in some of the blogs and dismissed the whole field as being akin to political bloggers - little expertise, too many pseudonyms and a lot of opinion.   Distant cousins like us here at Science 2.0 have done fine by stressing blogging is a small part of science outreach and Nature Networks was intended to be a loss leader for the magazine so is a marketing expense rather than a business value add, but attempts at blogging by Scientific American (I linked to the only one left?   They tried to have a platform a few years back) or Discovery never really went anywhere and even our friends at Livescience had blogging for only a few months.  The reasoning, in talking with various media executives who have dismissed blogging over the last few years, is that there is little money to be made trying to out-Atheist and outhate-Republicans at Scienceblogs and the market must not be there for anything more - because Scienceblogs was the big player.

And they were basically right.   Bloggers who wanted to get attention had a tough road if they believed the only way to get ahead was to get on Scienceblogs so, in a sense, for science blogging to live, Scienceblogs had to die.

Well, it won't die.  I predicted Scienceblogs will grow bigger than ever after Pepsigate because it got rid of some of the people who would make a big stink about more institutional and corporate blogs but, more importantly, science blogging now has the chance to get bigger because it removes the monopoly and so the larger public might now pay attention.

I have more than one reason to believe that; I have 65 million.   That's the estimated science audience, according to Comscore, but Scienceblogs was only reaching 1 million uniques per month.  1.5% of the audience.   When <99% of your audience ignores the largest player you do not have a market.   But now that Scienceblogs has undergone a shift there is an opportunity for new blogging networks to arise.    Believe me, that is good for everyone.   

Enter Scientopia, a group of former Scienceblogs folks and invited friends who put together a framework and are making a go of doing it their way.  The Code section reads a little bureaucratucally over the top in its attempt at stressing the communal stuff - I have said many times, the biggest mistake I made starting this was letting people vote on a name and a mission because no one agreed with me that Science 2.0 made sense and Scientific Blogging got the nod so we went with that for this first site in the Science 2.0 family - but they have at least taken their shot so let's see how they do.

I won't list each one individually.  A high-profile blogger named Bora Zivkovik at Coturnix has the most comprehensive insight into who the individual players are at Scientopia so check his piece out for that.   Will they be able to shuck off the Scienceblogs mentality?  We'll see.   Their homepage lists all of their own blogs yet no one else and that is very much the sort of insular culture that turned outsiders off from Scienceblogs.

One thing they should watch out for; a site named http://scientopia.com/ says copyright 2002 and they want to be starting out in a positive way, not a negative one by infringing on someone's rights, but it seems to be just a URL.   If they stick it out and the content is good, I will give them ScientificBloggers.com or ScientificBlogs.com or one of the hundred others I bought to let people vote on for the first site in the Science 2.0 network.   Seriously, I still can't believe people picked Scientific Blogging.