What Happened to the Science Blogs?

Something new is afoot in the science blogosphere. Seed Magazine has been busy inviting science bloggers to its ScienceBlogs website to create one big, aggregated science blog. Some of the bigger names in the science blog category have abandoned, or presumably will soon abandon, their old blog servers to join ScienceBlogs, including Pharyngula, Cognitive Daily, and Living the Scientific Life. The ScienceBlogs homepage operates like an RSS feed to give you a place to quickly scan the latest posts from all of their science blogs. According to Tim Lambert of Deltoid, "The main reason for the move is the chance to be associated with the fine group of blogs here. The designers at ScienceBlogs are dreaming up ways to provide links to interesting posts at other blogs on this site in the sidebar, so my readers can get some more value out of my blog. I also now have advertising in the sidebar. I hadn't bothered with this before because it was extra work for not very much money, but I don't have to do anything except write the posts and cash the thin cheques." Ahh, so there's the hook: They're getting paid to blog for ScienceBlogs. Nothing new there actually, since this is the business model of Weblogs, Inc., which founder Jason Calacanis just recently sold to AOL for a cool $25M.