I’m not home yet, and currently at another conference, but here’s a summary of the blogging session I was in at Sci Foo, interspersed with my post-session comments.
John Dupuis , of ScienceBlogs, gathered together a group of bloggers among the Sci Foo attendees, all from different science blog networks, to talk about the joys and sorrows of blogging on a network. It was attended by about 15 people, mostly bloggers themselves, and they pitched in with their stories as well. It was quite interesting to hear everyone’s blogging tales.
I mentioned that I’m 2 months short of having been blogging for a decade. I started in October 2000 [Fact-checking just now, it was actually September 17, 2000 Thanks, Internet Archive!], manually updating html on geocities pages to connect entries to the previous and next entry. It wasn’t about science, it wasn’t even in English, and I didn’t know the word “blog”, but as soon as I found out about blogger half a year later, I gradually moved from there to b2 and to wordpress on my own domain. I started blogging purely about science-related things in 2005, and joined Nature Network in 2007.
The longest-standing science blogger in the room was probably Derek Lowe, who has maintained In The Pipeline since science blogging prehistoric times. He never joined a network, but I pointed out that he doesn’t really need to: he’s been around for so long, and made a name for himself in science blogging all by himself.
Jonah Lehrer , who currently blogs at WIRED, started his blog on ScienceBlogs when his editor cut about half of his book, and he wanted an outlet for all the things that had been cut. “Of course, that’s not how blogging works” he added, and confessed to not having drawn on that source of material for his blog.
John Dupuis joined ScienceBlogs quite recently, after being invited when he criticized them for not focusing enough on librarians… He said that he really noticed a difference in his writing style now that he’s on a network. Since he is competing with other blogs on the ScienceBlogs last 24 hours page, he found that writing titles has become more important: people tend to click an intriguing sounding title more often, and he saw his visitors on those posts go up.
Carl Zimmer left ScienceBlogs for Discover last year, because he had worked with them as writer before, they made a good offer, and he preferred their small network over the massive crowd at ScienceBlogs. Discover only has about eight blogs, and, as he said “it’s not likely to get much bigger”. That is entirely different from the enormous number of blogs at either ScienceBlogs or Nature Network, and I brought up that some people at Nature Network who have been there since it was smaller are now feeling that people don’t notice their blogs. Plus, because all the very good established bloggers have already been picked up by other networks, we’re getting a lot of novice bloggers, of sometimes dubious quality. (I should point out that the reaction I got at this session when I carefully brought this up was entirely different that some of the comments Richard got on his post . It wasn’t just that nobody was personally offended, but they seemed to appreciate the sentiment, and the response was generally one of understanding – nobody likes getting lost in the shuffle or feeling out of place). Someone whose name I sadly don’t remember brought up the idea of tiers of blogs, but that comes with the problem of most people being “second tier” and nobody wants that! I’d probably be second tier, so yup, I’d agree that that’s not really the solution either…
I also brought up that with the dilution of blogs on Nature Network, we can’t even be sure if we’re really losing readers, because we don’t see out stats and referrals, but are now at the point where it becomes near impossible to find other blogs on the same network, and that is just not very helpful.
ScienceBlogs has entirely different things going on at the moment. I won’t rehash Pepsigate for you – you can find it elsewhere online – but what it came down to is: in the past few weeks a number of people left ScienceBlogs because Pepsi almost had a blog there. John pointed out that most bloggers stayed, but the ones that left were some of the most high-profile ones on the network. Carl said that following the whole saga made him sad, having been a former “SciBling”. (I think that comment really showed how people tend to feel connected to their networks.) He mentioned that a few people from ScienceBlogs now started up their own, independently run, network. [It has since gone live – Scientopia ]. Carl added “I think we’re going to see a lot more of those independent networks come up, now that people realize they can just set up their own.”
And we didn’t get to this in the session, but it is rather odd/interesting, isn’t it, that all those science blog networks are run by publishers? Are indie networks the next big thing? (There’s a free session suggestion for any of the upcoming blogging-related conferences. Bora, are you writing this down?)
So was this discussion, held in the closed environment of SciFoo, in any way useful? Well, for Nature Network it was. I didn’t mention it at the session, because I didn’t want anyone to censor themselves, but Steve Scott (head of online communities at Nature) and Dan Pollock (associate director of nature.com) were both present. I hope they got some useful ideas about where to go with Nature Network after hearing from some bloggers elsewhere on the web. They were both very nice, in case you were wondering, and really interested in what everyone had to say.
I also ran another session at SciFoo, and met tons of interesting people, and gave a short lightning talk, but that’s something for my other blog , about science and music. I may have too many blogs, and am currently trying to figure out what to do with everything to get some semblance of organization back into my web presence. Nature Network’s upcoming features will weigh in that decision, but won’t define it.