Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum: topic
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Benefits of blogging?
Eva Amsen
Tuesday, 17 February 2009 21:33 UTC
I’m currently preparing a talk for the upcoming Allen Press seminar (April 2nd) for which I’ve been asked to speak about obstacles for scientists in adopting science 2.0 technologies (e.g. blogs)
I’ve collected a huge list of links that I’m currently using to sort out my thoughts. It’s here in chronological order (the first one I added is now at the top, so you can kind of follow my line of thought. Just reverse sort it to see the most recent one I added at the top)
I’ve also asked a question on my blog that I would really want to address in the talk. I got some feedback there already, but wouldn’t mind more. The question is: What are the benefits for scientists to start a blog? Not the benefits for the community at large, but immediate benefits for the researchers themselves.
Knowing that I’ll be playing devil’s advocate, try to persuade me that blogging is important and relevant to individual scientists, and beneficial to their career.
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Re your question in bold, I am not a researcher, but I can think of a few off the top of my head:
Raises your profile in the broader community.
Raises the profile of your field and your research among colleagues.
Helps your cv when applying for job (potential employer can read).
Allows you to practice your writing via doing it and obtaining feedback from readers.
Use it to organise things, eg next time you are running a meeting or a session at a meeting, invite suggestions for speakers etc.
Get feedback on your research papers and ideas (that you want to share).
Helps you to feel part of a community esp if you are in a relatively isolated role – and connect with others in field/coauthors in different countries or elsehwhere when you don’t see them for a while.There are also advantages I can see to following other scientists’ blogs, but you didn’t ask about that.
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Thanks, Maxine!
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For me, writing more helps with writing the important stuff like papers and funding applications. It doesn’t really matter what I write about, although I find that writing about things relating to science issues helps me think through those issues.
This reminds me, I still need to post on how my talk went!
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Hi again, Eva. I posted a link to this post at Friend Feed, but because I know you don’t go there any more ;-(, I thought I’d link here to a response from Jean-Claude Bradley, who provides a spreadsheet of all the ways in which a bunch of scientists have found Friend Feed to be useful. It probably translates into blogging.
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Oh, I’ve seen the spreadsheet. I once typed out a long response to all of them, and ended up only really agreeing that 3 or so on the list were really FriendFeed-specific. Everything else could easily have been done elsewhere, or the same thing was on the list twice. The list itself was even on the list!
But I wrote that when I was especially jaded about FriendFeed, so maybe I’ll revisit it and blog it at some point. -
“This reminds me, I still need to post on how my talk went!”
Yes! I did get some inspiration from your slides already [seen elsewhere] in terms of things to think about. Thanks!
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Thanks for forwarding the link to the spreadsheet Maxine.
Eva – that spreadsheet came about because of a discussion about how FriendFeed can be useful to researchers. Carmen Drahl was writing a piece with a large focus on FF. I’m sure several of the entries spill over into blogging in general. -
I thought I’d missed Katherine’s post somehow. Katherine, get on it. And what is going on with the slides being available elsewhere? (good grief, I really do have to try harder to keep up.)
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No, they weren’t posted. I knew she was giving the talk and asked for them. Katherine, put them on slideshare! They’re sharable =)
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Yes, we have a Nature Network group on Slide Share, so please join it.
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