Recent replies to "Why do you blog?"

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:35:04 -0000

Here is that Essay on introverts, by Jonathan Rauch.

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:26:57 -0000

Hi Hans, I did not intend my comment to mean anything other than the fact that part of cognitive behavioural therapy is to suggest that clients start a diary, and that this has some similarities to blogging.
I think you have extrapolated my comment well beyond what I intended, or have any expertise to discuss.

Reply from Hans Ricke

Hans Ricke — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 03:21:23 -0000

Where did I miss your point?

Maxine: “This sounds familiar, Martin. Part of cognitive therapy is to suggest people undertaking a course start and keep a diary for various reasons, one of them being creativity but there are others.”

By adressing your remark as refering to unintentional therapy? The suggestion of diaries in therapy ( in general ) is well intended, no doubt about that.

Anyway I did not mean to deny the healthy aspects of blogging.

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Mon, 26 May 2008 13:10:16 -0000

Interesting, Hans, but I don’t think this is relevant to what I wrote, which was a different point.

Reply from Hans Ricke

Hans Ricke — Mon, 26 May 2008 10:09:02 -0000

Hi Martin and Maxine,

having been a therapist I am skeptical about approaching social phenomena as unintentional therapy. This promotes a view that things are not normal in the first place. This may lead to a tendency to see neurosis and pathology everywhere. Klaus Dörner wrote a remarkable book “Die Gesundheitsfalle” ( Health Trap ) which points out the consequences for a health system in terms of costs etc. if over-diagnosing happens.

Yours friendly
Hans

Reply from Hans Ricke

Hans Ricke — Mon, 26 May 2008 09:58:27 -0000

I found a forum on this website where everyone was supposed to present his own blog. So I tried it out and after two weeks I still like blogging. Here is my blog

I guess I like it because it can be non-serious as well as experimental. I do not have to think things over as in a scientific statement. I can also use it as my own diary of what I find in the net. Also quite interesting: I can meet new people this way and some were already very valuable!

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:06:17 -0000

This sounds familiar, Martin. Part of cognitive therapy is to suggest people undertaking a course start and keep a diary for various reasons, one of them being creativity but there are others—and I think an online diary has so much more potential, in the sense of the interactivity of like-minded souls. I have a very good essay somewhere on “introverts” which sums up the psychology of blogging very well, to my mind.

Reply from Martin Fenner

Martin Fenner — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 05:54:42 -0000

I did find scientific evidence for the reasons why we blog: Distress, Coping, and Blogging: Comparing New Myspace Users by Their Intention to Blog. Intending bloggers scored higher in the psychological distress scores and scored lower on the social integration scores. Blogging as coping mechanism, wonderful. This somehow relates to Anna’s post on Social Science from yesterday.

Reply from Gayatri Venkiteswaran

Gayatri Venkiteswaran — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 11:43:55 -0000

I used to find the blogging activity rather foreign..but not really so for the past one year where i`ve been a regular frequenter of ppl`s blogs AnD espl`y. those of graduate students and have infact even started doing it myself :) i strongly feel that blogging helps u communicate all ideas, thoughts,life, for which u don`t need to go looking for the right target audience ( cos they just come along,in search of someone like u ).
With me, science blogs helps find different views to a similar situation and also realise that PhD. is not a bed of roses, no matter where in the world u are.

Reply from Eva Amsen

Eva Amsen — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 15:54:06 -0000

I’ve been blogging in one way or another since 2000. First to tell my family how a four month internship was going, then a completely random blog about everything and anything. Eventually I grew tired of the pointless blog and wanted to focus on writing about science. I have a lot of friends outside of science who always seemed to think that science is really hard and something they couldn’t understand. So I started blogging about science of coffee, music, art, food, and other things that might appeal to anyone.

On my NN blog I try to write about the same type of things, but I sometimes veer a little more towards the research part of things, because I have a different audience here than on my other blog. (More peopel who have a background in science themselves)

Reply from anonymous

anonymous — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 03:48:11 -0000

The reason for me is quite different. I started blogging just few months back because I like to express my thoughts and I like to discuss in a group but unfortunately I am the only girl researcher in a Dept. of Physics and I am foreigner and the guys here in japan do not interact with foreigners and specially with foreigner girls (I heard that they feel shy because of language problems). So I do not have any outlet except I talk with my husband (the only friend and family member in Japan with whom i discuss). So when I feel a need to express some of my new thoughts when I am at workplace (my husband works at different place), I sometimes blog for last few months. I feel like to express my thoughts because earlier when I was in my country, I used to be in a group with almost no gender-bias of any kind.

Reply from Corie Lok

Corie Lok — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:13:06 -0000

Speaking as a journalist, I’m finding that my blog is a good way to come up with story ideas. People leave comments or send me things that make me think about something in a new way or tell me something I didn’t know about before…the makings of a potential story!

I attended a really great conference last week about the future of science journalism, where several journalists talked about why they blog. They gave examples of the stories they did for ‘traditional’ media that first took root as blog posts.

Reply from Bronwen Dekker

Bronwen Dekker — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:17:15 -0000

This is the story of how I started blogging:

I was unemployed and trying to refine my CV. I found that it was impossible to say everything that I wanted to say in two pages. One way around this was to include a webaddress that I could refer people to for further information. I did not know how to do this so went off to have a coffee at the local coffee shop. I then wafted about the library where I saw a book called something like “Blogging for Dummies” and flipped through it. I noticed the website blogspot.com and the description in the book looked so idiot-proof that I did not need to take it out of the library. I went home and created:
http://brondekkerhome.blogspot.com/

I messed around a bit with a few ideas, but when the Nature Network started, I thought “this sounds like fun” so emailed Matt.

I don’t have a good reason really other than that I am more comfortable communicating electronically than in real-life and it allows me to feel part of the community.

Reply from Graham Steel

Graham Steel — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 21:07:26 -0000

@Graham E-L,

Hi Graham. Graham here.

What is ‘weglog’? Anyways…

Cluster maps are great in geographic terms but not in greater detail.

The best open source tracking blog/website app that I’ve found/installed so far is Sitemeter.

As per the norm, you have to £££’s to get the deluxe model, but the free version is damn good.

Go check.

Reply from Martin Fenner

Martin Fenner — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:45:55 -0000

A lot of good arguments for blogging. Interestingly, writing about the science we do is motivation just for a few bloggers. We have the urge to have other people interested in our words (as Brian put it), and we care a lot about the science we do, but we rarely combine the two.

Is this because science blogging is still fairly new? Or is there a line we do not cross with material that we reserve for peer-reviewed manuscripts?

Reply from Graham Ellis-Davies

Graham Ellis-Davies — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:00:53 -0000

I started to write my own weglog to vent my feelings about a particular issue. I was rather angry about a review process of an article of mine I simply had to vent in a semi-public way.
Now I write bits in my weglog which I tried to keep very positive about really lovely pieces of work. I sometimes write to folk I know telling them I like their paper. Science is such hard work these days, esp with funding pressure. I think it is nice to send good karma.
I have cluster maps attached to my own weglog, and am curious as to who reads it, and why. I will probably never know.
http://cagedcalcium.blogspot.com

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 19:27:09 -0000

I like both your answers, Bob, both of them resonate with me.

In answer to your question, I initially found my personal blog to be this wonderful and positive therapy—it opened up opportunities for me similar to those described my Matt (except the TV appearances!)—just by doing what I enjoyed doing (writing book reviews mainly). I have an introverted personality and it is just a perfect fit with that. But as I am also a compulsive workaholic perfectionist, I found that gradually the blog was controlling me—I felt that I had to post, I started thinking about how to generate traffic, etc. So over an enforced vacation off-internet (probably a summer family holiday) I had a think about all of this, and decided that I didn’t do blogging for these reasons but purely because I enjoy it. So now I am much more relaxed about it and like the whole thing more. I have also met some really good friends in the 2.5 years since I’ve been blogging. (In reality, that is, rather than on the aether.)

Reply from Bob O'Hara

Bob O'Hara — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 12:22:30 -0000

I guess I should give a serious answer (even if the other one is broadly accurate).

In addition to the “I just want to EXPRESS!” sentiment we all have, I sometimes find blogging useful for getting my thoughts in order – writing stuff down just for yourself feels pointless (and I never looked at my hits anyway, so I could convince myself I was being read).

A couple of times I’ve done some small work that is interesting but couldn’t be made into a paper. It can be valuable to blog it, and telling the relevant community.

Does anyone else find that The Blog Monster gets hungry, and needs feeding with a post?

Reply from Matt Brown

Matt Brown — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:56:49 -0000

I started blogging about three years ago on londonist.com purely because I had a great passion for something (history and culture of London) and needed some kind of outlet. I would never have guessed the doors it opened for me, including getting a job at Nature (I have a long background in science publishing, but having the blogging experience certainly helped).

The rewards have been immense. Writing on this site, I’ve met such an interesting bunch of folk and learnt a hell of a lot more about how science works than when I was a journal editor.

The non-science blog also led to a book, TV appearances and other opportunities I could have scarcely dreamt of when I started. And I know many other people whose careers have taken new and unexpected directions because they took the effort to blog a few times a week.

Reply from Maxine Clarke

Maxine Clarke — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:38:09 -0000

I was asked this question last year, and I answered it on my NPG blog, Nautilus. Here is an excerpt:

Earlier this year, I was asked by a scientist blogger, Attila Csordas, “what is your science blogging style?”. Here is my answer, which was posted at Partial Immortalization during November:
“My professional blogs (Nautilus, Peer to Peer and From the Blogosphere) are addressed to a particular group of people: scientists who read, review and publish, or would like to publish, in our journals. Therefore, the style I try to achieve is helpful, informative and stimulating, yet not didactic or dull. I aim to highlight the benefits of publishing at Nature Publishing Group and provide assistance to those wishing to do so, in a way that is not too directly promotional, but which is constructive to authors and interesting to them and other readers, as well as encouraging their feedback. Therefore I write about news concerning journal policies and format, as well as announcements of new journals, projects, conferences and online tools of interest to authors and reviewers. I also highlight when journal content is free for some reason, because this means that the authors of those articles are achieving greater “reach” for their articles (as well as making it possible for more people to read them, by my announcement). I also highlight news from the wider world of science communication, for example about quality indicators (citations tools and impact factors, for example), ethics, peer-review and so on, in the hope of stimulating community discussion of these issues, as this can help us decide on our journals’ evolution. Finally, I blog to provide an approachable forum for potential authors to ask questions about our publication policies, and to have them answered quickly in a way that can also benefit others, as they can see the responses.”

I also have a personal blog which has nothing to do with science. Like Henry and Brian, I love being part of a small community of people who have common interests and think a bit like me (very few of us about). And if you are as time-strapped as me and don’t have a “real” social life because of work, family commitments and commute, blogging is a perfect way to spend a focused slot of time interacting with people or being a bit creative (writing), at the hour and duration you want. It makes a nice change from being at the beck and call of work colleagues, authors ;-), family etc. Am I sounding like a control freak here? Well, maybe, but it is nice to have that lovely little island of my blog sitting there for whenever I have the odd half hour to take it out for a “walk in the internet”.