What happened: Essentially, Simon Singh wrote a comment piece – original article - for the Guardian newspaper, discussing chiropractic medicine. The British Chiropractic Association sued Singh personally for libel.

What happened next: Singh is a well known science communicator, and he had the resources to fight. From my point of view, at this point the internet got angry. Some wonderful people got hold of this story and would not let it drop.

Then what? The result is that two years later,the BCA has dropped the case, the Libel Reform petition has over 50,000 signatures, the Campaign for Libel Reform is going strong, there are manifesto pledges from all three major parties to investigate libel laws, and mainstream media coverage of both libel laws and scientific evidence has become realtively frequent.

So why am I particularly interested? There has been some astounding investigative journalism in the blogsphere in recent years, and it seems to be increasing all the time. This, though, was the first time that I became aware of the power of this type of communication to have a serious effect on events. Not just through calls to arms, but also through the high-profile end of this spectrum keeping the public eye on the case, suggestions from one party being carried out by another. Speedy and public communications meant that each group could share expertees and knowledge as it was gained, in a way that would not have been possible even ten years ago. see this article and Jack of Kent for some reaction and discussion of the role of the blogsphere in this case.

So thats a quick intro to the story. I’ll probably be talking about it again, trying to crystallize some thoughts on exactly what happened, so watch this space.

woo, first post!