It's perhaps fitting that as CERN was the site where the World Wide Web had its own big bang that this session should consider the impact that the web, in particular Web 2.0, has been having on CERN's most famous gadget, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The panellists considered how corporate and independent science blogs might be shuffling into place alongside traditional news media in terms of reliability of the information posted there, often anonymously, and whether blogs can be trusted as a news source and appropriately evaluated.

Freelance journalist Matthew Chalmers put the case for blogs as a way of letting information out anonymously so bloggers can avoid retribution from attribution, but it's the getting the news out that's important. Information leaked to the "Not even wrong" blog in late 2007, regarding serious delays to switching on the LHC, was first ignored by the official LHC blog before it proved to be correct. Chalmers believes that CERN should not be too quick to try and 'clamp down' on or censor bloggers.

Next the room heard from CERN scientist and blogger Tommaso Dorigo who is troubled by the communication gap between less accessible science and the public. News from particle physics is probably reaching only the enthusiasts who go looking for it. His view is that blogs by scientists can go some way to bridging the gap and even speculates that anonymous comments on blogs could be where important news might be broken. He acknowledged that such blogs can be seen as threatening by the large scientific collaborations which work together on CERN projects because the blogger can post data more quickly than it can be formally published and 'can a secret be kept by 2,000 people?' News published on blogs has been picked up, and in some cases misrepresented by mainstream media and experimenters have considered ways of restricting collaborators from blogging about internal data. Unapproved data might alert the competition or risk reputations, but jealousy may be a factor if the non-bloggers feel irritated by being 'out of the loop'.

James Gillies, CERN's Director of Communications spoke about how blogs have changed the pace of his role as an information gatekeeper - independent bloggers can find information and they can find it quickly. CERN's strategy is to handle information openly, honestly and quickly - but this hasn't always been the case. During the official great switching on of the LHC there was minute by minute, metre by metre twittering and blogging of the beam's movements until the LHC broke down and with it CERN's communications output and some of the relationships that had been built up. Since then CERN has been more open about its activities, providing regular updates on repairs. The scientists' blogs are seen as a good way to humanise the complex science and provide good PR, although it's likely that guidelines may be drawn up for how bloggers can best work within their professional duties. Gillies ended by highlighting that, for science journalists as well as others, blogs are still a new source of information and people need to learn how to evaluate them.

The presentations were followed by some lively responses from the audience including comments that bloggers are a knowledgeable and passionate group of people who often provide a corrective function to stories that have been misrepresented elsewhere and a call from another commenter for a little more respect for science journalists. Finally, as evidence of the pervasiveness of real-time information sharing, throughout the presentations and discussion the proceedings were tweeted and retweeted on the Twitter back channel. You can read the Twitter transcript here http://is.gd/1lTBB.

Jo Brodie