Ten reasons why blogging every day is a BAD thing
Matt Brown
Thursday, 11 October 2007 19:14 UTC
http://www.mpdailyfix.com/2006/06/w_why_blog_post_frequency_does.html
Anyone care to disagree?
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It seems to me that Bronwen and Deepak are representing two different types of user — Bronwen is most interested in what is going on in a specific community, Deepak in what is going on everywhere (for a particular topic). Nature Network seems to provide the ability for the “Bronwen” type user, and Scintilla/Postgenomic/trackback for the “Deepak” type of user.
My own experience concerning the “Deepak” type of user is that a lot of scientists (who are not themselves in the more internet related discipines, such as bioinformatics) don’t really know or understand about aggregation and tracking —it is still a minority pursuit for most of the global scientific community. -
a lot of scientists…don’t really know or understand about aggregation and tracking
I’d suggest that it’s the role of sites such as Nature Network to educate them!
One way to do that would be to implement aggregation or syndication at Nature Network. I’m all for people starting new blogs at NN, but a lot of us already have established blogs. I’d be happy for my content to be syndicated at NN, either through RSS aggregation or a module similar to Facebook’s Flog application.
I agree with Deepak’s points about the “NN-specific” blog setup. It might be easier for would-be NN bloggers if the system were more generic and used standards like XMLRPC so as they could use external tools (e.g. the Scribefire Firefox addon or other blog editing software) to post to NN.
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Maxine
I don’t necessarily disagree, but old doesn’t mean better :). There is a reason the New York Times started blogrunner last week, which tracks blog conversations and news stories across topics. I don’t think their crowd is cutting edge either. You want a more aggregated view. I actually love the idea of community, which is why I like the forums here.
Blogging on the other hand is by nature (no pun intended) more loosely distributed. You can have strong blog networks (like scienceblogs or b5media) which get a bit of an identity, but being able to track a conversation from outside a limited spectrum is the main role of blogging IMO.
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I certainly agree with Deepak and Neil, and did not mean to give the impression that I wasn’t in favour of developments like those you describe and more. Of course, as more scientists (people) come to hear, learn and use the many options available to them on the internet, their use will grow and evolve. My reply above attempted (probably poorly) to encapsulate two types of current user, but I did not mean to imply that “ne’er the twain shall meet” or that usage would not evolve in all kinds of directions. (And also, I didn’t mean to suggest that there are only two types of internet user ;-) )
I am certainly one of the enthusiasts for these modes of communication, though I am not as technically adept as Neil, Deepak and many others. For me, the internet lets me do the same things as I did before, only better. And hence, it leads me to do new things that I hadn’t thought of before. -
We kind of need both sorts of tools, NN should feel like a community, but one that is aware of its place in the wider internet conversation. One of the metaphors I’ve been kicking about is the archipelago, there are many islands, but they can be and are connected. We are planning changes for the blogging framework on NN, so this is timely feedback
All good food for thought, thanks
Gavin -
Some comments:
From my own experience, posting frequency has a very strong impact on traffic. If you engage in more conversations with the blog more people start linking to you. This also helps in rankings in sites like Technorati and Google main search. All of this together brings more traffic to the blog. Having said this, I typically prefer low volume blogs since on the high volume ones I will only be interested in one of two posts out of tens and I don’t want to spend that much time filtering posts.I am not sure if a large traffic is important or not for academic blogs. I am not interested in making money, I am more interested in reaching other scientists in related fields and this is probably a small number to start with :).
About forum vs aggregation. I agree with Deepak that aggregation of decentralized opinions is much nicer. It gives each one more control over there own content and the editorial choices are not made by editors but come directly from what the whole group thinks is important to discuss.
We would all gain from having very strong tracking sites in science. The feedback to the discussion is very important but currently very poor. It helps everyone to see what is under discussion and allows everyone to add their opinions. The importance of the tracker is self-reinforcing (i.e. network effects). The more people read their news from the tracker the more important it will be and the more it will serve its purpose.
This feedback has kicked in a long time ago in Techmeme but I don’t see it happening with Postgenomic.
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