Dear Mom,
Yesterday, I got a ‘Scooby Snack’ on ‘The Chemical Forum’ !
I have absolutely no idea what this means, but am terribly excited about it!
I discovered this forum (and some other really interesting chemistry pages) about 10 days ago on doing one of those: ‘What will google spit out if I type in ‘Chemistry Blog’?’ searches. My very first post after signing up, was callled Chemistry Methods at Nature Protocols .
I then spent the whole (#) of the next day checking to see how many views I had gotten and to make matters worse, not only was I wasting time/energy, but there had been only 12 views that day: 2 of which were ‘me’ and one of which was probably Katharine.
I have since made a further 7 posts most of which are in response to other peoples’ questions. I think that I will enjoy contributing in this way more, and if a Nature Protocols manuscript can be mentioned to help solve a problem, then that will be great, but it will not be my focus.
Anyway. I should probably get back to chasing authors and then, if I get through that quickly, I will have time to work on the Protocols Network manuscript that I told you about!
Yours etc.
Bronwen
(#) By whole I mean that I checked it about once and hour… You can see the number of views without opening the post. I noticed, though, that if I opened it from inside the section (Free Chemistry Advertising, and other links offsite) the number of views went up, but if I clicked it from the ‘Last post’ column of the forum page, that the number stayed constant so maybe millions of people have looked at it (ha ha). I wonder if this was coincidental or a real effect…
The use of Scooby Snacks as ‘rewards’ by The Chemistry Forum got me thinking. Apart from the popular cartoon, my only other frame of reference was from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals song ‘Scooby Snacks’...... A quick check on Wikipedia later and I have learnt that there are a number of alternative meanings out there…...some of them with very interesting ‘chemical’ connotations! However, I never encountered the Glaswegian version in my years as a student there; perhaps it is a recent phenomenon….... But I’m happy that you’re so excited by your Scooby Snack and I hope you get many more!
Dear Bronwen,
A scooby snack! When I first saw that, I thought it said ‘scooby smack’ so was reassured to find that it was something a bit less violent.
You sound quite excited about your recent postings; I hope that you get a lot of helpful feedback. I would be interested to hear your thoughts on what you think makes a successful forum topic/blog/post: is it just a combination of relevant topics and good marketing or are there other key elements?
Hope to hear from you soon,
Mom
Snowy London Eye
Dear Mom,
Thank you for the letter. I thought I would quickly jot a few bloggy thoughts on postcard. While these statements are written as ‘facts’ they are just my opinions at the moment.
I think that most blog-readers behave similarly to people reading the newspaper during their coffee breaks. They look at the titles and the pictures. If something catches their eye they will start to read it.
Unless the person is your mother (!) they probably won’t comment unless they have an answer or an opinion immediately. That is not the only requirement. They also need to have the vocabulary to express their opinion and the desire to share it with other people.
So if you wanted to start a discussion about a specific bioinformatics problem. You will probably get much more input (and of a better quality) on a forum set up by bioinformaticians than on a general science forum. If you want to have ‘activity’ on a given forum, you need to post topics/ask questions that are both interesting and that either (i) are easy enough for the people who frequent that forum to answer, or (ii) you know someone who you can invite to answer the question.
So, I am not really sure that the blogging psychology is that different to normal-life. We somehow expect that people will ‘talk’ on blogs or forums, but really they are more like emails or letters in that people have to think before they communicate and therefore often choose not to!
Waffled more that I planned to (the text is bigger than the photo). Am off to do some piano practice now.
Bye for now, Bron