Science of Blogging
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video pussy wet pissingScienceblogging Roundup - February 27-March 5
Mar 5th
While we post lengthy discussions here on Science of Blogging, there are many research updates, news stories, videos, etc. related to science communication that we come across on a daily basis that never grace the pages of the blog. Most of these mini-stories we share with our followers on Twitter, and we encourage those of you with active Twitter accounts to communicate with us there to get real-time updates of all the stuff we are discussing (Follow Peter and/or Follow Travis). For those of you who shy away from Twitter, enjoy below the best mini-stories that we came across during the prior week along with links to the original source so that you can follow the full story.
- Communicating science online - our friends at Peer Review Radio interview a who’s who of science communication, including Bora Zivkovic (editor of Scientific American blogs), Greg Gbur (Dr Skyskull) and others. Definitely worth checking out. (Peer Review Radio).
- Web breaks echo-chambers, or, ‘Echo-chamber’ is just a derogatory term for ‘community’ - an epic post recapping Bora Zivkovic’s speech at the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (A Blog Around the Clock).
- How to make a blogging business plan… whether or not it’s a business blog - great advice on how to plan for success with any blog (Problogger).
- What happens when your blog generates tons of discussion, but not of that discussion is on your blog itself? (Six Pixels of Separation).
- The mere existence of whales - this post doesn’t have much to do with the theory of science communication… it’s just a terrific example of how amazing it can be when done well (The Loom).
Those are the posts that caught our eye this week - did we miss any? Feel free to add them in the comments section below.
Have a great weekend!
Travis
How do Physicians Behave on Twitter?
Mar 2nd
As the popularity of social media has increased during the past few years, it is not surprising that the number of physicians using these tools has steadily increased. In general, I would argue that this is a very good thing. Social media can be an excellent tool for disseminating health information, and I know many physicians who use it extremely effectively to that end. The American Medical Association came out with a set of guidelines for physicians using social media in November of last year, and it seems to share my positive view of the benefits that physicians can experience online. From the guidelines:
The Internet has created the ability for medical students and physicians to communicate and share information quickly and to reach millions of people easily. Participating in social networking and other similar Internet opportunities can support physicians’ personal expression, enable individual physicians to have a professional presence online, foster collegiality and camaraderie within the profession, provide opportunity to widely disseminate public health messages and other health communication.
But the guidelines go on to point out that things can also get a little hairy online if you let your guard down.
Social networks, blogs, and other forms of communication online also create new challenges to the patient-physician relationship. Physicians should weigh a number of considerations when maintaining a presence online:
(a) Physicians should be cognizant of standards of patient privacy and confidentiality that must be maintained in all environments, including online, and must refrain from posting identifiable patient information online.
(b) When using the Internet for social networking, physicians should use privacy settings to safeguard personal information and content to the extent possible, but should realize that privacy settings are not absolute and that once on the Internet, content is likely there permanently. Thus, physicians should routinely monitor their own Internet presence to ensure that the personal and professional information on their own sites and, to the extent possible, content posted about them by others, is accurate and appropriate.
(c) If they interact with patients on the Internet, physicians must maintain appropriate boundaries of the patient-physician relationship in accordance with professional ethical guidelines just, as they would in any other context.
etc…
So how are physicians doing with their conduct using social media? More >
Weekend Roundups - An Easy Way to Help Your Readers
Feb 26th
For the past year on Obesity Panacea, Peter and I have been doing a weekend post linking to articles and blog posts that we think might be of interest to our readers. We didn’t come up with this idea ourselves - in fact we quite happily copied it from Darya Pino (Summer Tomato) and Yoni Freedhoff (Weighty Matters) among others. We aren’t able to post one every weekend, but we try to do one whenever we have time.
Making this type of weekly roundup post is easy - we typically just look back over our tweets from the past week and/or the interesting links we’ve forwarded on to colleagues, and then arrange them into a list. If we didn’t spend much time online in the past week, we will quickly visit popular blogs in our area, or see if there have been any useful posts on Researchblogging.org. Whereas a typical post on peer reviewed research can take up to a few hours, a roundup post rarely takes more than a few minutes. And yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if roundup posts were among the most useful for any blog. Why? Roundup posts perform two key functions:
1. Weekly roundups provide extremely useful content to your readers More >
How to write a good research blog post
Feb 24th
Travis’ note: Dave Munger has been a writer and editor for over two decades. He was the coauthor of Cognitive Daily, one of the web’s best-known research psychology blogs. He also co-founded ResearchBlogging.org and ScienceSeeker.org, which collect thousands of science posts from hundreds of blogs in several different languages. He is a columnist for Seedmagazine.com and and 3quarksdaily.com. Here are his thoughts on what to do, and what not to do, when writing a blog post about science.
Scientists and science journalists have all sorts of reasons for writing about science. They may want to share their latest discovery with the world, run a hypothesis by a critical audience, increase their personal profile, or show that they’re cut out for bigger things, like the gossip column.
What I’m going to talk about here is specifically how to write a good research blog post; the kind that might get picked as an Editor’s Selection on ResearchBlogging.org. We typically look for posts that will be interesting to a wider audience than just experts in a field. So it’s important to be clear and engaging, and to give your readers a little help understanding a study that’s probably out of field for them. This post borrows quite heavily from a post I wrote on Cognitive Daily four years ago, so you might want to check that post out too; there are some great tips in the comments section.
1. Find interesting research
This may seem like an obvious step, but there are a couple of problems with the way scientific research is often reported today. First of all, interesting doesn’t necessarily mean new. The major science journals like to make a big splash when their latest issue comes out. After all, the more people hear of them, the more likely they are to subscribe (or ask their library to subscribe). But the general public doesn’t spend every day poring over press releases to find the most up-to-the-second research. What’s interesting to the public is research that’s relevant to their lives — or research that’s just too cool to ignore. This might be a study that was done months or even years ago. If they haven’t heard of it, it’s news to them. The most popular article ever on Cognitive Daily reported on research that was two years old.
2. Make sure you understand it!
Take the time to read the study carefully. If you don’t understand some bit of methods or analysis, find out about it, preferably going beyond just a wikipedia search. This will obviously be easier if you’re in-field, but I often find that writers take some aspects of the research they’re writing about for granted. Question everything! I kept several psychology textbooks handy when I wrote for Cognitive Daily, and I try to verify everything I write on SEED as well with a non-wikipedia source.
I like to underline or highlight key sections of the document I’m writing about, but in general I avoid referring to it as I’m writing, except to verify facts and figures. In this way I’m sure I’m putting everything in my own words.
I also like to put the study aside for at least 30 minutes before writing it up. This helps me clarify my thoughts and come up with a fresh perspective on the material, because the next step requires a writer to approach the article in a new way.
If you don’t have a blog you don’t have a resume
Feb 8th
Editor’s Note: I have previously come across some of John Dupuis’ wonderful posts on the benefits of blogging in academia and beyond on his ScienceBlogs blog, Confessions of a Science Librarian. After meeting John in person at Science Online 2011 last month, we had a great chat and decided that we’d share some of John’s thoughts on Science of Blogging. Here’s John’s eloquent thoughts on the topic.
I was just going to call this post “On Blogging” but I decided I like Robert Scoble’s rather provocative statement better. This is not to say that I agree with his rather extreme stance, because I definitely don’t, but I think it’s an interesting way to frame this collection of links I’ve gathered over the last little while.
The point here is to make the case that blogging is good for your career. It’s been good for me and it’s been good for a lot of other people and I think it has potential for everyone.
Now, is everyone a blogger-in-waiting? Of course not. Would absolutely everyone actually benefit from blogging? Probably not. And if absolutely everyone did take up blogging, would the massive amount of noise generated actually cancel itself out and end up hardly benefiting anyone at all?
Probably.
That being said, let’s take a look at what’s been making me think about blogging lately. More >
What factors make a blog successful?
Jan 10th
I know, I know - this question is terribly open-ended. There are obviously any number of factors that can contribute to the success of any given blog.
Some blogs may be horribly written and contain largely useless information, but if authored by some celebrity, it will likely become popular regardless.
Also, something as simple as the blog design, is surely going to impact its popularity; we like to look at things that are appealing to the eye. Thus, I predict, all else being equal, the blog with a more visually-appealing interface is going to be more successful.
Blog interactivity - in terms of the degree of discussion that is encouraged, and how easy it might be to share the information on a given blog might also influence popularity.
While I could go on forever making semi-plausible assertions of factors that influence blog success, the reason I am writing this post is because I recently came across (thanks to random Googling) a Master’s thesis published online looking at this very issue.
“The Study of Blog Success Factors and Their Effects on Web Business” is a thesis written by Kuan-ting Lin and defended just under a year ago. More >
If you have time for academic conferences, why don’t you have time for blogging?
Jan 7th
Earlier this week I commented that when scientists discuss the reasons that they don’t blog, it almost always comes down to 2 key concerns:
1. They don’t have the computer skills.
2. They don’t have time.
On Wednesday in my post titled “If you can write an email, you can write a science blog”, I did my best to argue that computer skills are no longer a barrier to science blogging. Today I would like to take on the second, and I think more important argument. But first, an important admission. More >
If you can write an email, you can write a science blog
Jan 5th
I’ve been blogging about my research for a little over 2 years now, and in general the response from my colleagues has been quite positive. People are often quite interested in the use of social media to spread the word about their research or network within their field of study, and some of my grad-student colleagues have even been convinced to start blogs of their own (e.g. here, here and here). And yet, when I speak to more established researchers, even ones just out of grad school, they invariably bring up 2 key objections to blogging:
1. They don’t have the computer skills.
2. They don’t have time.
Today I’m going to tackle the first of these objections, and I’ll come back to objection number 2 later this week. More >
Science of Blogging Blog-cation: Happy Holidays
Dec 22nd
Just a quick note to let everyone know we will be taking a holiday break from blogging and will return with tons of fantastic new content and new guest science bloggers in the New Year.
Happy Holidays! And apologies for the creepy Santa picture - apparently he isn’t a fan of new technology.
Peter
How readable is your blog? A quantitative assessment of science blog accessibility
Dec 20th
Editor’s Note: Over the weekend Colin Schultz started a great discussion on his blog about the reading level of science blogs. He has graciously offered to share his thoughts on Science of Blogging. Also, just in case you were wondering, you can also check the readability of your blog by heading over to Google and typing in “site:YourBlog.com” and clicking on the Advanced Search link, right below the regular “Search” button. From the options under the heading “Reading Level”, select “annotate results with reading level” and presto! You have yourself an assessment of the reading level of your particular blog. And now here’s Colin.
What grade are you in?
If you’re an adult, that’s probably not a question you’ve had to think about in a while. According to the pieces of paper on my wall, I’m in 17th grade. If you have a PhD, you’re a bit higher. If you never had an opportunity at post-secondary education, then you’re in 12th grade, or lower still if you didn’t complete highschool. Your level of education isn’t a perfect measure of your reading ability, but it is a decent estimate.
[Ed: This is frightening, but I (Peter) have technically completed a total of 23 grades: high-school until grade 13 (old Ontario system), plus 4 undergrad, 2 MSc and 4 PhD.]
Now, let’s say that two weeks ago you got wrapped up in the excitement about the discovery of a bacteria that can supposedly use arsenic in its DNA. It was intriguing, everyone seemed to be really excited about it, and you wanted to know more.
So, where could you turn?
If you sometimes go by Dr., you probably had a decent chance at working your way through the original study. If you are early in your university career, Ed Yong had you covered. If you are still in highschool, and you wanted to know what other scientists thought of the research, then Carl Zimmer had a story just for you.
These suggestions aren’t based on the level of technical depth or the amount of detail in the science, but are instead based on the different stories’ estimated reading levels. One of the most common assessments of reading level (and the one that comes bundled with Microsoft Word) is the Flesch-Kincaid readability test. Using the number of syllables, words and sentences in a piece of writing, the test spits out the school grade for which the writing is best suited.
Newspapers, which try to make their writing as accessible as possible, often try to keep their reading level at or below that expected of a high-schooler. Improving readability makes it easier for people to understand the point, and will probably improve the odds of keeping the reader around all the way to the end of an article. Much like writing that over-uses jargon, if readers have to work to get through a piece of writing, they will probably just tune out.
Now, I’m not sure exactly how they do it (and it may not be perfect*), but Google has started letting you filter your searches by readability. The results aren’t as detailed as the Flesch-Kincaid test. Rather, a site’s content is split into three buckets: basic, intermediate, or advanced. More >
