Blogging in nephrology: Local versus National conferences

Desai et al show in a study that scientific blogs can be a great tool in sharing and viewing scientific local meetings. Most of the recent literature and live blogging that has been done has been of national meetings. Most non academic practitioners want to hear about the happenings are national meetings. In Nephrology, many online blogging sites have done this in the last 4 years.  The data presented here in this manuscript suggests that while the number of viewers were less in local meeting blog posts, the minutes spent and time spent were equally comparable to national blog posts. The authors suggest that this would be a great way to share and use local conference material. Bogoch et al looked at blogging site of intern morning report and had subjective rating scales but knowledge content was not looked at. 

Overall,this manuscript is a step in the right direction and allows for openness of presentation of data in national and local conferences via blogging. Both conferences can be equally useful to the learner.  

Interestingly, publishing in formats as such( F1000 research journal) when peer review is also open and allows for free commenting before completely being accepted for publishing allows for more information to be discussed and an open dialogue. More and more journals should be moving to such platforms of publishing( at least partly). There might be red tape and other factors preventing this. The Plos Journals are a great example of the futuristic journal platform. Cost, and potential bias based reviews might be reasons why this might be not as attractive to many journal editors.