Traditional news media such as newspapers and television have never been particularly good at covering science, and it is only getting worse as they attempt to cut costs. In contrast, an increasing number of blogs are doing an excellent job of covering specific areas of science. Science Gossip aims to support science journalism through blogs by collecting science news of interest to the average person and letting the blogosphere handle the in-depth coverage.

Science Gossip has the following goals in mind:

• Provide a comprehensive science news resource for the average person.
• Link to blog articles discussing recent science news.
• A filtered news resource so that the average person is not overwhelmed by the amount of content.

What it is not supposed to be are:

• A comprehensive educational resource for science in general.
• A repository of every science news article under the sun.
• An avenue for publishing press releases.

Science Gossip only stores links to relevant blog articles and short summaries for each article, and the main content is in the blogs themselves. Science Gossip does not attempt to automatically gather all blog articles covering science news, nor does it try to write content of its own. Instead, blog articles are submitted by the editors or ordinary users, including the anonymous. From among these articles, the editors selects the ones that will be published on Science Gossip. Only those that would be of the most widespread interest appear on the front page, while others only appear in the category-specific pages.

Reading Science Gossip

While one can keep up with new content on Science Gossip by regularly visiting the web site, using a feed reader would be a much more efficient way to stay up to date on new content published on Science Gossip. Instead of having to remember what content was already seen and regularly visiting multiple pages to discover new content, a feed reader does this all for you and shows new content only when there actually is new content.

The front page and each category page have their own feed, which is available by clicking on each page. Alternatively, most feed readers have the ability to discover the feed automatically given the link to the page.