It’s humbling to see how all the little art-and-craft things I did as a little girl, and my mom did before me, are once again propagated by my daughter. Remember friendship bracelets, also called Brazilian bracelets on the eastern side of the Atlantic? Made by weaving snips and bits of embroidery floss together? (Or rather, knotting them)?
(the website didn’t like me linking to their photo of friendship bracelets, correct attribution or not)
So, what with Steffi’s thread ongoing, as well as bits of snippiness floating around out there, I thought I’d aggregate and glean for a while, rather than leave unintentionally offensive material in other people’s forum discussions.
Eva Amsen has aggregated, much more thoroughly and in an applied manner, in her recent Some notes post. (Which for some reason I only see today, though its original reference was February 18th?). She assembles for the purposes of a talk she will give, various opinions on the benefits of blogging and other forms of social networking. I particularly love this:
Forums and Usenet groups have been around since the previous century, and people just… used them. But then MySpace and Facebook came around, and the general flavour of the internet went from geeky to fun and now the “social” in “social networking” has become something to be scared of. As if the original forums weren’t social!
Thanks to recent archiving efforts, I can find with a quick google search on my maiden name, posts I made to Usenet groups (and thought were ephemeral) back in 1989. Geek credentials fully validated.
In a recent (public) thread on NN that rubbed a lot of people the wrong way, including the original poster, Michael Nestor left a tangential comment that was more interesting than the muck in which it was abandoned, only to be picked up in private later. While I don’t particularly agree with it, I certainly support his right to write it, given its manner, which set it apart.
The initial idea was (as I understand it) that it might be possible to quantify any revenue Nature makes from advertisements it places on Nature Network, and one could consider that we NN users and content-makers are responsible for that revenue. If NN continues to forbid users from advertising, a policy which is imperfectly applied because vague in what advertising actually constitutes, it would be more consistent if NN itself did not accept corporate advertisements.
In various incarnations, this has come up before. I’m not bothered to find the links, mostly because until the cancer-curing MT4 comes along, it’s a little difficult to search and find with the vague sorts of keywords I can think of.
My take on this, though, is how can we possibly compare any pecuniary benefit that the Nature group theoretically might gain from the traffic, to the benefit the users themselves get from the content we create as we use NN? Such intangible benefits as Eva herself outlined in her last blog post? Which seem to already offset any investment we are voluntarily contributing?
I am not at all convinced that one can quantify any putative monetary value of the web traffic that NN generates. I am sure, however, that the costs to the Nature group are possible to quantify. Servers and the people who love them, stroke them the right way, and if nothing else, weed through all the spam for us bloggers, are not free for the taking, among other costs.
The advertisements that I see usually seem to have to do with other services that the Nature group either sells or provides for free, which is in my opinion quite reasonable and unobtrusive.
The question then arises, how much personal OR corporate advertising is reasonable and unobtrusive? There is probably an individual tolerance threshold. If Bob cares to repeat part of a comment he made in private relative to three good criteria for measuring that, I thought it was quite cogent.
I also think that vague, borderline-style advertising will be self-regulating. Even if a blogger has come out with a book on science eg. Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science (to pick an off-site example without actually advertising it), and then spends what I find an inordinate amount of time flogging it on their soapbox 1, I will click elsewhere. Same for intrusive pop-up windows or large percentages of screen space. It’s still a free Internet – for the time being – and monetarily that is probably thanks to advertising.
1 This is not to imply that what flogging Ben does is necessarily inordinate by my standards.
I’ve given up on several blogs that were being used primarily to sell the blogger’s books, link to yet another review, advertise the author’s public appearances etc. I have no problem at all with an occasional post about the writing or publishing process, an announcement that the book is published, an link to a review, or even a suggestion that readers should buy the book – if it’s interspersed with some other content. But some of my RSS feeds got binned after the 12th “buy my book” post in a row. The Loom springs to mind (I reluctantly stopped reading after his E. coli book came out – the good posts were becoming swamped by advertising).
I have to admit that, besides being somewhat busy in the last few days, I’ve also been stunned by what’s been going on in those threads you allude and one of which you linked to, Heather. I am still unsure how to react, to be honest, and really mostly feel like things have been blown way out of proportion in every possible direction. Was there something in the water?
Concerning advertising on the NN site, I might have made the point more strongly than you: running this site costs money, and I have a feeling that – considering most of the ads seem to be for other NPG products – the revenue from it can’t be great. We won’t find out, of course, as that would be company private information. Meanwhile, I’m quite happy, actually (as long as people will please stop the useless fighting over silly things!! I am a sensitive soul).
I commented on this post before reading all the other threads. Yikes!
Yikes!
My reaction exactly. I wish I hadn’t looked.
Because I am bound not to discuss a private conversation, let me just say this…
I do agree that it costs NPG money to do this…but we should also understand that NPG promotes their own journals with NN, and in the publishing world, I assume that that is as important as generating hard revenue. For the rest of the discussion, I would suggest looking at the private conversation.
I am not so sure this is a silly or trivial point Steffi…and I am not saying that NN is evil or bad, but as a “community” participant, I am certainly asking for a little more transparency.
My main point, which I have never gotten around to making, is that to encourage science blogging on NN, we need to show scientists in a clear way how this benefits their career-much like publishing a paper will get them the next grant or a job…
In order to do that we need to be transparent about what NPG gets and what NPG gives us, and what we can and can’t do with that.
Maybe NPG should encourage blog citations in their papers, so that these can be treated as relevant academic documents when applicable?
Who knows…and to some…who cares.
“we need to be transparent about what NPG gets and what NPG gives us, and what we can and can’t do with that.”
I agree, and I have to say that I am not seeing why this topic is so controversial. I’m not saying that NPG should open up its accounts, but just that we should be able to have a conversation about it.
that to encourage science blogging on NN, we need to show scientists in a clear way how this benefits their career-much like publishing a paper will get them the next grant or a job
Speaking only for myself, of course, I really have no expectations about science blogging benefiting my career. Benefiting my non-academic life and overall happiness, however, is an entirely different matter, and just as important. IMHO. My career is predominantly in education now, though I continue to be actively involved in several biomedical research projects, and I’m not sure I agree with the simplistic notion that papers and citations = grants and jobs. There are a number of prominent and not-so-prominent examples of scientists who have got jobs, tenure, promotion, grants, etc. in academia, with publications that are very few and far between, and not necessarily particularly significant or ground-breaking. The reverse is also true.
I missed the threads and incidents that occurred last week; I think I was in transit between Cambridge and Cromer. Yikes is my reaction as well.
Michael, I did not mean to imply that any particular points made were silly – just trying to lighten things up. And I agree with Kristy perhaps in that I don’t expect any specific benefit from my activity here, other than enjoyment and a creative outlet.
…and that’s me bowing out of that discussion again!
just that we should be able to have a conversation about it.
Well, exactly! And you can stay in it, please, Steffi or anyone else.
As for any other unpleasant experiences, I am sure we can all learn from them and move on.
Meanwhile, “to encourage science blogging […], we need to show scientists in a clear way how this benefits their career-much like publishing a paper will get them the next grant or a job… […] Maybe NPG should encourage blog citations in their papers, so that these can be treated as relevant academic documents when applicable?”
I am quite sure this has already been discussed – let me look for the thread a bit, as I am not sure it was on NN. Well, here in comment 2 and here. If I remember right, other benefits again are difficult to quantify, but are in nature (no pun intended) more related to networking benefits like conferences, seminars and retreats: job contacts and collaborations, and general trust-building.
Before anyone says that we’ve seen a good example of how Internetwork-built trust is pretty fragile, think of how many collaborations you know that have gone sour for similar reasons of misunderstandings. I can think of a few in my wider experience and one (of many other great collaborations) personally.
And while I was looking, check this comment out: “the bloggers can do whatever they want, including directly criticizing the sponsors.”
Could part of the ticklishness of the situation be that as users of NN appear to bite the hand that feeds them (or sometimes, just nibble it), not everyone is equally confident in the buffering capacity of the system? With Corie and a couple of others whom I’ve met out there, I am personally not worried in the slightest.
For me, the transparency is not really necessary. There are lots of blogging platforms out there, and I have a humble idea of my importance on the Internet, which is that it would get along fine without me.
As I said elsewhere, I think advertising tends to be self-correcting. If people use their blogs on NN to consistently and incessantly promote a product (apart from themselves: the whole exercise is narcissistic anyway) then the readership will get bored and stop reading (data not shown—but I do have some). If commenters sign up purely to advertise a product then it’s pretty obvious to an old cynic like me, no matter how cleverly disguised it is; and I report the commenter to the mods and get them to close the account.
NPG doesn’t make money from NN. It makes a lot of goodwill though (not to mention gaining beneficial exposure), so I think that for the most part we the bloggers gain as much as, and in a similar way to, NPG itself. I’d say we’re pitching about right, so far.
Yes, this comment is loaded. No, I’m not elaborating.
I’m going to have to revise my advertising campaign:
This bus terminates at the station, Henry
On advertising, I was justifying myself for this post, saying that I did it because (1) it is relevant to science, (2) it is something I had been involved in and not a generic ad, and (3) was a one-off. I wouldn’t suggest that these are necessary conditions, but that’s what I was thinking.
Thank you for repeating your great generic criteria, Bob. After all, would we find it gratifying to blog if we couldn’t share our personal successes? I wouldn’t, though they are sometimes few and far between, and mostly would result in promoting the success of a journal in which I published.
If some of those successes could be sold, or could be taken as advertising the company in which those successes took place, then applying a measure of relevance / personal implication / frequency of reference to the product seems to sort the wheat from the chaff. I’m quite happy to hear about personal experiences with publishers, commercial opinion aggregators, newspapers, expeditions and the like – and I don’t feel under any pressure to buy the product per se. If I find it too much of a hard sell, time is limited, I’ll look elsewhere, and the advertising fails.
I think that the Akismet spam filter, decided on by the hosts of my other blog and pretty darned efficient, uses similar criteria to sort legitimate comments from ads/bots: relevance (in that a response to a more recent post is scored higher than one to an ancient one, but also of course via keywords), personal implication (IP addresses for the most part), frequency of reference (the more links, the less likely to make it past the filter, especially if to an undesirable IP address based on the 2nd criterion). I also think that no one will have interpreted that link as an advertisement per se, although they may have, correctly, as an endorsement. Is that borderline? (It may be, I’m curious about your reactions.)
(Doggedly trying to stay on topic) I think everyone who blogs on NN has extracted some benefit from it, largely (and let’s be honest here) due to our association with the Nature brand. I’ve included my blogging activity on a couple of CVs now (for freelancing and day jobs), and there’s just so much more cachet if you can say “I started my own blog, which gained in popularity and was noticed by someone at Nature, who invited me to blog on their Nature Network platform”. It just makes the whole exercise sound so much more respectable, and does a lot to expunge the perception of bloggers as teenagers talking about classroom gossip or whatever.
I’ll milk the NN connection unashamedly in every CV from now on… I think that’s fair use, and if NPG makes any money at all from people who read my blog and click through to an advert, then I think that’s a more than fair exchange.