Blogs, as Carl Zimmer astutely noted at this year’s ScienceOnline conference, are software. Despite all the hand-wringing over whether science bloggers can or should replace science journalists the fact of the matter is that science blogs are the independent expressions of a variety of writers about subjects which they feel passionate about. There is no single science blog archetype that all blogs must fit, and this flexibility allows science writers the freedom to compose and promote their work in an increasingly fragmented media landscape.

Hindsight being what it is, of course, I can look back now and see that I ended up doing the right things for the wrong reasons. I started science blogging in the autumn of 2006, a