The ScienceOnline09 Series (Intro): You Are Now Entering The Blogging Zone

Last Thursday, I entered The Research Triangle for the ScienceOnline09 conference. It was a place of both shadow and substance, both things and ideas. It was a place where the cryptic elements of the blogosphere manifested in three dimensions; personalities known only through pixelated text subject to the imagination took on faces and voices that would forever alter my perception of the messages flashing next to the user names I encounter every day as an administrator of ScienceBlogs. But unlike The Bermuda Triangle where people are rumored to disappear due to the activities of paranormal beings, at The Research Triangle, the mysterious beings who have been known to enact change in the physical world via thought focused and sent into the aether, appeared live in the flesh! And they appeared to be quite normal, though exceptionally smart and congenial.

Stay tuned, ScienceBlogs readers. For in this blog series, I will take you to a world where the mysterious avatars of ScienceBlogs convened to discuss the future of the field that is becoming ever important to the way science information is communicated, both in the scientific community and to the general public.

Hat tips to Anton for taking this photo and Greg Laden for the creative Photoshopping.