It's no secret we have done things our own way here - no marketing, no corporate hierarchy, no political or cultural litmus test and no requirement that you already be popular before you can join.

The big net of Science 2.0 is exactly what some people in science resent about it.    ScientificBlogging is one crucial part of the Science 2.0 experiment but it's not the only part.    Therefore it can be a threat to people who regard science communication as part of their fiefdom, either corporate or perceptual.   Basically, a way for them to make money and control the message.

That can be a little frustrating - the curse of popularity - because anyone who spends 7,000 hours of their life working for free and then gets potshots taken at them by paid employees of companies trying to make money ... well, it's odd, but it shows that the broad science community is not above jealousy and infighting and a little Machiavellian subterfuge.    

But it's often the case that when annoyance sets in, something else happens that makes this stuff fun again, and that's a blessing.

This afternoon, I got a package from Howard Bloom.  Inside was a copy of his latest book and he wrote an inscription to me.    If you don't know Howard Bloom, it won't do any good for me to try and describe him but he is a mad genius in the classic sense; not the kind of sociopath who puts monkeys in long-term isolation and operates on their brains but instead a brilliant thinker who's always slightly out of phase with the rest of the world.

Science 2.0 has a long tail.   I first got to know Howard because David Houle wrote about him, so I asked him to write something for us.   Well, Howard cannot be brief.   He sent chapters that must have been 25,000 words long but, since I am not a scientist and am instead the audience that is a crucial part of Science 2.0, I had decent instincts about how to put his work into manageable chunks and over the course of time we established a long-running dialogue.

Howard is a visionary.  Who else could clobber Thoreau and endorse more consumerism and make perfect sense doing it?  This time he is reinventing capitalism.   I'll read the book and let you know what I think later but in the inscription he thanked me for being an 'inspirer.'

Well, I have enough ego to like that but it required some thought; how do I inspire a guy so full of ideas he has to push aside 15 in order to get out a book on one?    Even geniuses need to know who the market is, I suppose, and I am Science 2.0, whether some more militant scientists think it is one thing or another they happen to want it to be.   Howard had sent me a pre-publication Word document of the book (back then it was called "Reinventing Capitalism: Putting Soul In the Machine") complete with something no one who buys the book will ever see - the massive, unabridged endnotes and perhaps my notes made a difference, I have no idea at all,  but he may not have meant 'inspirer' in a direct sense.

He once wrote to me that Science 2.0 in general and Scientific Blogging in specific was "utterly fantastic, a dream site for us science junkies" and he wasn't the first to say so.  Any number of authors have 'tried out' material for books here because we are not ideologues or partisans, we are simply the science audience and all that encompasses.   Anyone can get smarter here, Republicans or Democrats, religious people and atheists, experts and novices.

And that's a pretty good way to describe Science 2.0.   Let's not change a thing.