A recent Pew Internet study estimates that about 11%, or about 50 million, of Internet users are regular blog readers. A new weblog is created every 7.4 seconds, which means there are about 12,000 new blogs a day. Bloggers — people who write weblogs — update their weblogs regularly; there are about 275,000 posts daily, or about 10,800 blog updates an hour. Two articles over the last few weeks have been asking why there is such a dearth of scientific blogs.

In the August 1 issue of The Scientist, writer David Secko interviews fellow chemist Derek Lowe. “As far as I know, I’m alone, and that surprises me,” says Lowe, whose blog is named In the Pipeline. It’s a surprise because blogging allows a competitive edge in finding information, getting in touch with customers and colleagues, and commenting on the pharmaceutical industry, says Lowe. (…) A second article, The Hunt for a New Drug: Five Views From the Inside appeared in the July 29 issue of Science. Again, Derek was featured as one of the Pharma industry insiders.

Being a scientist myself and author of a blog, I have often wondered why there are so few academic or pharmaceutical bloggers. Surely, there must be plenty of scientists with an opinion. However, while a freewheeling blog can (1) get people’s ideas going and (2) provide valuable context to the topic at hand, an industry as competitive as the pharmaceutical one is fairly risk-averse when considering a possible weakening of their IP position. Hence, I’ll doubt that you’re ever going to find a real in-depth discussion of late-breaking results in the the public domain.

What about blogs in a corporate setting? Could you set up corporate blogs for internal-use, to provide a venue to discuss the aforementioned late-breaking results at least with your colleagues inside the company? I suspect that legal departments across the pharmaceutical industry would clamp down on such blog use as well - in the wake of the recent Vioxx court proceedings, it has become amply clear just how damaging free expression in email, blogs or other documents can be. It’s a potential headache that pharmaceutical companies just don’t want.