I’ve been asking people about blogging. In particular, I’ve been asking why scientists should blog. There was a long list of answers at both places but I’ll try to summarize it a bit:

Benefits of blogging for scientists

• Direct contact with the public, increase visibility of scientists
• Get your own version of the story out there
• Convince other scientists about use of other online tools, add respectability to concept of blogging
• Receive feedback from other researchers, coordinate things (e.g. ask for speaker suggestions)
• Stay current with field (if recent studies are discussed), stimulate thinking about science
• Improve writing and communication skills (advantage for research scientists)
• Get noticed, expand network (advantage for scientists interested in science communication)
• Get your field noticed
• Be part of a community (advantage for otherwise (geographically/disciplinary) isolated scientists)

Reader notes: Abrupt change of topic! Fourth wall comes crumbling down!Several days pass… Calendar pages have been changed (one per calendar), the season changed from winter to spring and back to winter again (Toronto weather…).
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The first part of this post has been an unpublished post for days and days and days. I got stuck. I wanted to subdivide the answers into categories, and then explain why some/many people might not find these valid benefits, but there were different ways to do it, and it got really complicated, so I just hit “save” and decided to come back to it later.

I’m still stuck on it – I tried to sort by “type of blogger” or “type of audience” but there is too much overlap everywhere. I guess it doesn’t really matter for this blog post, but I am thinking about all this in preparation for a talk I’m giving on April 2nd at the Allen Press seminar in Washington DC, and it’s not going to be just about blogging, so I wanted to summarize this a bit for one slide. That’s one slide I’ve been working on forever.

I actually only have one slide done, so far. Well, not really. I haven’t made it, but yesterday I realized what I wanted to start out with. The first slide will be this image, which many of you will have seen before:

It took me a while to find the source of it, but I found it: the cartoon, which has been circulating the internet for years, was drawn in 2004 by Asher Sarlin, who was a student at the time. The original image file is called “distractions.gif”, and this is certainly how many scientists see a lot of online activities. But at the same time, this image isn’t realistic. It’s no longer possible to do research, or even write an undergraduate research paper, without the internet. It’s not all whimsy and jollity girls in bikinis and dinosaurs with birthday cakes out there.

Here’s another relevant cartoon . It’s a PhD comic about Facebook.

In the comic, Facebook is said to be a tool for “notworking”, and I guess it is. PhD comics is aimed primarily to graduate students, and a large part of its audience is on Facebook themselves. To avoid work? Possibly. They’re also reading comics to avoid work. If you scroll down on the cartoon’s page , you’ll even see a handy link to submit the comic directly to Facebook, where you can share it with your procrastinating friends with the click of a button. Simple! Scrolling further down, there are some more buttons that let you interact with other sites. You can submit or vote for or discuss the comic on Reddit, Digg, Slashdot, Delicious, or StumbleUpon. These are all websites that allow anyone to start an account and actively discuss or vote for their favourite websites. Of these services, I only use Delicious, because that’s a useful tool to organize your bookmarks (and it just happens to be social). In fact, I’ve been collecting a bunch of links on Delicious in preparation for my talk . WAY too many links. Social networking, and scientists’ interaction with various services or blogs is such a huge topic that I found more links than I could ever hope to discuss or refer to in 20 minutes.

Web 2.0 is all the rage now, but talking about science on the internet is not really anything particularly new. Let’s go back to the PhD comic page and scroll even further down. There’s another link, separate from the Digg/Reddit/etc. icons. It says “Discuss this comic in the Physics Forums.” The Physics Forums have an archive going back to 2000 – way before “web 2.0” , and they are not a tool for “not working” at all! There is math and physics homework help, but also career tips for postgraduate physicists, and discussions about anything from classical physics to branes and beyond. 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!

So, I think that’s my angle, so far. I’ll just show comics for 20 minutes talk about older uses of science online vs newer ones, and try to figure out what makes a blog scarier than a lab website. And I’ll get back to why I use Delicious, and what makes it (and Flickr) work, and how that could relate to getting scientists to adopt web 2.0 tools . Sounds good?

(I’m not going to include this cartoon , no matter how relevant, because of some of the phrases at the bottom. There’s distracting, and there’s distracting )