News of interest from the medical librarianship, informatics and oncology blogosphere:

• Science blogger Kevin at We, Beasties urged scientists and researchers to contact their Congressional representatives to support continued funding of science by the U.S. government. Many programs, including NIH funding, are facing budget cuts.
• Martin Fenner of the PLoS blog Gobbledygook discussed strategies for discovering conversations about new scientific articles using blog aggregators and microformats.
• The Scholary Kitchen posted about a new report on peer review from The Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley. “If there is a general theme in this report, it is that academic publishing has yoked a system of distribution (journal and scholarly book publishing) to a system of evaluation (promoting and rewarding faculty), and that this coupling has resulted in a dysfunctional system.”
• James Gleick’s new book The Information was reviewed in the New York Times last Sunday.