I had only planned to do one talk at this year’s Science Online London 2010 conference, but the second day had some “unconference” slots where people could suggest their own talks. John Timmer from Ars Technica wanted to run a session about how bloggers with a decent readership deal with comments, and I agreed. We wrangled in Alok Jha from the Guardian, a paper whose website is no stranger to fiery commentary, and the organisers melded our session with a suggestion by Julia Heathcote Anderson, who wanted to talk about how we can fix the reputation of scientists online.

So here’s our impromptu panel discussion, which I’m quite pleased with given that we had got together around 10