Do you write more for friends, colleagues or for the general audience?
Hank Campbell
Thursday, 06 March 2008 03:38 UTC
In my various (albeit admittedly limited) internet wanderings among the science blogosphere I see a cross-section of writers with a variety of approaches and audience sizes. There are large sites like ours or Nature or LiveScience or Scienceblogs and then smaller ones like Cosmicvariance or Realclimate right down to successful independent ones like badastronomy.
But most people write for a pretty limited audience.
Everyone here probably started writing for a limited audience also. So what motivated you to start and keep at it? Was it to correspond for friends, more technical in nature or were you interesting in writing science for the public?
If you didn’t have an audience of hundreds of thousands per month and up, would you still do it?
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Replies
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I realize this original post is over a year old, but I wanted to write a reply as it is a question that I’ve struggled to answer as well. I may be spreading myself too thin in my efforts, but for my science blog I really try to write for a wide audience, from “laypersons” with some science background that are willing to learn and expand it, to professionals.
I specifically blog about stem cells; many of the stem cell blogs I’ve seen focus (often entirely) on stem cell news and politics, while not going into the biology enough to quench my curiosity. This originally inspired me to create my blog; I wanted to explore the topics less visited by most stem cell blogs (i.e. history and the biological details) and in this way educate myself more as well as make this information more accessible to a wide audience.
This means that for my posts I try to give a bit of background and explain terms, but at the same time I try to throw in details and explanations so that professionals are still interested and find it informative to read. A lot of it also comes down to how motivated your audience is; I provide links to terms that may be unfamiliar to some readers, and if they take the time to visit those links and read up on the background they’re missing then they can gain much more from the posts.
I would definitely still keep at it even if I had a smaller audience as I enjoy having an excuse to practice my science writing and read more about the lesser reported aspects of stem cells!
If you’re interested, my stem cell blog is All Things Stem Cell .
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I don’t have an audience of 100,000s each month
If I wasn’t having confidence issues before, I certainly do now…I blog because it is a good way to help improve and develop my writing and communicating style.
Everynow and again I get feedback and conversation from others in the blogosphere, and it’s always nice when you get a nod and hattip from someone much larger.My blog targets more everyday people. But I write mostly about things which interest me, as that’s what I write best about.
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I don’t think any of us have an audience of hundreds of thousands individually but as companies the audience is quite large. Lots of people write individually. Plus, if you do good stuff and get out in the community and interact, people will find you and it will grow organically.
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An interesting conversation… but one with lots of good answers, so i thought I’d add mine.
First of all, I don’t have 100,000’s of hits. On a good day, I have 100-200 people reading my blog, and possibly more, if someone tweets it. However, that’s still a tremendous motivation for me. There probably aren’t much more than 1,000-5,000 people in my field, and if anyone finds the material to be useful, I’m thrilled.
(Of course, I should add that it took at least a year before my readership went over about 20 people a week – persistence is key.)
I’ve written a lot of technical articles, drawn pictures, and presented what I feel is a relatively candid and unique viewpoint – which is often lacking in any given field of science. If I’m lucky, my posts are also a great way for people to start a dialog on a previously neglected subject. So, for me, when I see a dialog ensue, i’m very encouraged to keep going.
Additionally, having a blog has helped me raise my profile in my community, make contacts and the readers of my blog have often made insightful comments that have proven to be very helpful in my own research.
What more motivation could I want?
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