For years I refused to watch the move Love, Actually . It got good reviews, and several people with great movie tastes recommended it, but it has Hugh Grant in it and I don’t like Hugh Grant so it seemed out of the question that I would like anything in the movie at all. It would have that terrible icky Hugh Grant-ness all over it. Ugh, how do people stand him?
Last year I rented it on a whim to see how bad it was… Well, turns out I loved “Love, Actually”, actually! I realized people had recommended it to me because it has one of my favourite storytelling tricks – interweaved stories of people who don’t know each other. Fantastic! I barely noticed Hugh Grant. I watched it three times, and only stopped because on the third time watching I started picturing Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson in their respective roles in the Harry Potter movies instead, and then it just got plain ridiculous.
What I’m saying is: don’t judge a movie by one of its actors, and don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t judge an entire site by the whimsical comments of some people
Okay, so people are being social and silly and having fun in threads that could have been serious and on topic all the time. I understand how that could be considered annoying: my threshold for whimsy is very high (all my favourite science blogs are humourous or art related) but even I have grown tired of the cephalopods at Pharyngula, for example. However, that does not in any way affect my visits to other blogs on ScienceBlogs or my opinion of SEED magazine.
Below the fold I left a list of various forum topics and blog posts on Nature Network that all stay on topic, that offer a range of different discussions and viewpoints on matters of science from all angles, and that were not hard to find at all.
It includes technical questions, thoughts about the future, the woes of grad students, tips for funding in Latin America, science and sport, alternative careers, writing tips, book suggestions, thoughts on Chinese journals, etiquette, and an elaborate discussion on consciousness. Sure, you’re not going to be interested in all these topics, and I’m not even going to bother diving into that super-long consciousness forum thread, but the RT-PCR tip and Perl/Python thread really helped me out, as well as some of the discussions about science communication or leaving the lab. Others might be more interested in sport or podcasts or NMR. There should be something interesting in this list for everyone. Something that you might…love, actually.
And with that I’m going to leave you with the list, and I’m going to be offline for a day to finish a thesis chapter, so I’ll be back Thursday.
What I’m saying is: don’t judge a movie by one of its actors, and don’t judge a book by its cover, and don’t judge an entire site by the whimsical comments of some people
What’s rather ironic is that Deepak appeared to be saying that he liked Jenny’s blog, and then it was Neil Saunders who got his knickers in a twist about off-topic comments.
Which is rather strange, because there were a couple of comments about rabbits (and I was, believe it or not, making a point about mol biol-ists and whole animals) but most of it seemed pretty constructive to me.
Oh, except for a snide comment about biologists depositing data. Made by one ‘Neil Saunders’. Which was promptly and thoroughly ignored.
Meh. Draw your own conclusions.
Thank you for this constructive and encouraging blogpost.
Ditto.
(Gratuitous off-topic comment alert: I don’t like Hugh Grant either, but you have to admit that in the scene when he’s singing ‘Good King Wenceslas’ outside of Martine McCutcheon’s front door, the look on his face when the chauffeur rolls his r’s is hilarious.)
Eva – I take your point, which is definitely valid, but equally I think it is defending something that doesn’t need defending (I suppose I would as one of those ‘some people’.) As Jenny said in her original comments on this, those who moan seem to have missed the ‘social’ part of social networking. This isn’t a paper posting site. If it wasn’t fun, and sometimes off-topic, I think it wouldn’t be doing its job.
Incidentally, I’m wondering if we aren’t doing a bit of an oxygen-of-publicity job on this FriendFeed stuff. It was irritating, but it seems to be dominating NN at the moment!
I agree. from now on, people should only discuss FriendFeed with an actor’s voice.
Thank you for this nice post, Eva.
For a one-stop shop of Nature Network’s usefulness to scientists in their role as authors of papers, I write a weekly column at Nautilus, the author blog, which is archived here
Suggestions for entries to feature are always very welcome, but it is never difficult to find them.
Some of those FF people are very clever bioinformaticians and supersonic programming, high-tech types. I can certainly see that, to them, Nature Network is a little, er, low-tech. But I think this misses the point. There is room for it all, the Internet is full of useful niches. I think that sometimes people fall into the trap of criticising a website or online resource for not doing something they wish or think should be done, rather than accepting it for what it actually does do.
So, for example, Neil Saunders (named above) has mentioned that web 2.0 is about data-data interactions, not human social interactions. I am sure in one sense he is right, that scientific connections and insights wiil, one day, come from semantic data advances. But Nature Network isn’t that and was not intended to be that. (Is anything, yet?) People find NN useful for various purposes, and interesting and/or entertaining, for the reasons you write, and others. It has its limitations, but many people seem to like it (including me). Did not like Love Actually all that much, though ;-).
I liked Love Actually except that it was about half an hour too long.
Thanks Eva for all those links and for saying such nice things about NN.
Maybe I’m reading too much into the comments and post here, but I just want to say that I wouldn’t want to see a sort of NN vs Friendfeed rivalry/competition brewing here. Criticism is healthy and we at NN have always appreciated and acted on feedback we’ve gotten from Neil, Deepak, and anyone else who cares enough about NN to notice and talk about us (even if the feedback is negative—we can take it!).
The people in the Life Scientists group on FF are also Nature Network users (even if they are only occasional users) and vice versa: I’ve just joined this group on FF and find the discussions and links there enlightening, as I find them here on NN.
I appreciate people coming to the defense of NN, but let’s not get too caught up in the cycle of criticism. I’d like to try to move the discussion forward and explore larger issues.
(Incidentally, I also love Love, Actually! I think I’ve seen it 2 or 3 times now.)
@Brian “If it wasn’t fun, and sometimes off-topic, I think it wouldn’t be doing its job”
Well, I can see how people might be in a hurry and want to get straight to the discussion without chatter, and there are many threads in which this happens, even on Nature Network – hence the list of links.
@Corie I was just frustrated with the fact that the whole site seemed to be judged on one comment thread (generalized, at least, maybe not "judged") and I’ve heard some vaguely dismissive offline comments about NN as well (“facebook for scientists”, and said in a tone that was meant to imply “stupid timewaster for scientists”) so I thought I show some things that might be relevant to anyone not interested in too much chitchat. It was inspired by the FriendFeed thread, but that was not the first time I’d heard similar comments.
Yes, Eva, online networking in general (whether it’s Nature Network or other sites) does have a credibility issue in science and we’re working hard to change that attitude, but attitudes are slow to change.
In fact, I think networking in general (the old-fashioned, face-to-face kind) isn’t very well taught/valued in graduate school, as it is in, say, business school. Or maybe it is, but under a different term, such as ‘presenting at a meeting’. So if ‘networking’ isn’t a big part of the academic scientific culture, then taking it online is even more of a stretch. So I think that’s where those comments you referred to come from.
It takes ‘believers’ like you Eva to start to change minds and attitudes. Thanks again and keep up the good work!
Hi, Eva,
I didn’t relise what the title of your group was, until trying to focus your topic in NN. well, we do a lot of things authomatically, and we need a lot more of expression patterns like yours!
thank you for enlightning us, and keeping high our social needs of cross cultural exchanges (thsi was a friend-of-mine title of his english learning class)
keep posting, and tell us your observations
I keep a blog, in addition to the group bioactives on NN
http://czechfood.blogspot.com
best wishes
palmiro