Science Blogging Challenge: Get a Senior Scientist Blogging
Matt Brown
Friday, 05 September 2008 14:38 UTC
As announced at the London Science Blogging Conference on August 30th 2008, we hereby challenge all scientists to get a senior scientist blogging. The ultimate aim is to help scientific blogging gain more momentum and credibility – and also to have some fun. Points will be awarded for:
• The seniority and reputation of the blogger (both in absolute terms and in comparison to the person who convinced them to blog)
• Their previous lack of experience with blogging and other new-fangled online habits
• The quality and quantity of the posts, their relevance to science, and any demonstrable positive impact they might have already had
• Other criteria that will no doubt occur to us later
Please submit nominations (including self-nominations) by email to ‘t dot hannay at nature dot com’ by January 5th 2009 using the subject line ‘I got a senior scientist to blog’. All formal judging will take place shortly after this date, but we encourage early nominations so that we can sign up for the RSS feeds. Please include:
• Your name and affiliation
• The name and affiliation of the blogger
• A link to the blog
• Any interesting anecdotes, or reasons why you think it deserves to win
The winning blog will earn the chance to be included in The Open Laboratory: The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2008. The blogger and instigator will also each earn expenses-paid trips to Science Foo Camp 2009, to be held in July or August (exact date still to be confirmed) at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.
The decision of the judges (that’s us) will be announced in January 2009, will be final, and will probably be somewhat arbitrary.
Good luck!
Peter Murray-Rust
Cameron Neylon
Richard P Grant
Timo Hannay
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Oh yes, we also get bombarded by emails from people who didn’t like something we published, but it turns out we didn’t publish it, another journal did.
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Subject: “I got a senior scientist to Blog?”
Dear Matt and the Team,
Blogging is the newest way of dissemination of information, but most strikingly to take the information to peers in our field of interests as well as to the public.
Blogging also from traditional or even digital publications of scientific work in a way that any common man with little knowledge can go to the blog site and try to grasp a comment, discussion or an article as much as possible. But, if the blogger is a good writer, he or she will incorporate some simplicity to the writing style, simplicity into the comprehension, content and to the grammatical English to make it easy for all to understand.
The question is how many scientists, or how many senior scientists or great scientists can bring their science to common man to understand?. This is a daunting question, because this used to be and still is one of the great lacunae of taking science to the people.
Blogging is a great place where we can do this, we can take the science to people.
It is more important than ever in the history of scientific research to do so! because the policy makers, the funders and the govt authorities constitute the public in addition to lay man. Blogging can be a platform where scientists walk along with others who cannot understand the intricacies of doing science, but can understand a simplified science if we can tell them the simple story of our science. That would be have great impact on improving science funding and attention to our scientific crisis via blogging.
If you carefully look around various scientific societies and organizations, they are constantly asking people for support for science, if we can make them understand the importance, values and results of science to our day to day living, what better way we can do science, blogging can bring such understanding in which traditional or journal publications sure will utterly fail or they do not have an option to make their publications understandable to public?.You see!?.
Science funding is diminished so badly that scientists and their research work is suffering from this financial crisis, on top of all we are having the greatest financial crisis ever at this moment. But, hopefully things will turn out one or other day in the future if not in the near future. Blogging could bring in more attention to this crisis, yes it is a good initiative, but ask first the younger generation to participate more before going for the senior scientists.
Having said the above, are the senior scientists (whatever is your criteria is to be senior, which I do not see in your message?) equipped or skilled enough to use blogs, do they understand the basics and technical handling of a Blog, or a blog design or how to blog?. If they know, then why we are not seeing senior scientists blogging?. What is the reason we do not see many scientists blogging?.
In my neuroscience field, I can’t even name a few scientists who blog on science or for that matter even personal blogs, let alone senior scientists?.
So, how many senior scientists will be able to blog?, if we can get them, it certainly will be a boost to your initiative.But the question still is why get some senior scientists to blog, while we not have young scientists blogging??.
Blog and blogging is primarily a new tool, newest of all communication modality that we have today, if the younger generation did not catch up with the ongoing trend, how would you expect a senior scientist to grasp and get involved?.
I think the need of the hour is to encourage as many young scientists and graduates to get involved in writing their work, their experiences and whatever they wanted to write about, so more bloggers will join science blogging.
More and more science blogging will encourage the senior scientists accross all spectrum of the academy, then we will be looking at senior scientists blogging and pushing this science blogging to the next level.
Hope this helps.
Muni Subramani M.Phil., PhD
Neurophysiologist
My blog: http://neuromonitoring1.blogspot.comI am kind of wondering about your topic “Get a Senior Scientists Blogging”.
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The winners of the challenge have just been announced here.
Results
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