Individual blogs versus corporate blogs

[David_Colquhoun]

It seems that the most popular science blogs are those that are run by individuals. Science web sites run by big organisations are less interesting. First, is this actually true (most sites don't publish numbers)? If it is true, then why?

[Frank Swain]

Hi David! Good opening topic!

I think it's debatable whether the best blogs are run by individuals - one one hand yes, at the core of any good journalism project are a talented, passionate writers. But on the other, big organisations have the staff and "muscle" to organise offshoot events and projects - e.g. Nature Networks with their ScienceOnline conference next week (sponsored by SSW, no less...). Of course there's no reason this can't happen spontaneously without paid staff (e.g. badscienceblogs), but I think it helps. Look at the Great Flu game designed by the Erasmus Medical Centre - no way it could have been done without funding, but an exciting, fun way to educate people about disease control.

One of the big issues facing me and Greg as we developed the site related to this. Namely, even if we sat down and created the most splendid amazing magazine website about science, would we be doing anything different to what was already being produced out there for free (or at least, at no cost to the taxpayer). Even moreso, we have to consider the lifespan of the SSW site - there's a set budget and it's unlikely to be staffed forever. This cemented the idea that SSW should focus on being a portal to science rather than an end destination. So the blog entries we do have will hopefully act as hooks, directing people onto to other areas. Someone arrives at the site to watch a Coke & Mentos video, they get extra info on chemical reactions, links to careers in chemistry, links to blogs by chemists, experiments they can do at home, after school science events run by museums, etc.

We have a duty to address the key aims, but I also want to see a site that lives on rather than be a one-off campaign.

[mjrobbins]

It seems that the most popular science blogs are those that are run by individuals. Science web sites run by big organisations are less interesting. First, is this actually true (most sites don't publish numbers)? If it is true, then why?

It depends what you mean really. The most popular science blogs are generally run by Seed Magazine (e.g. SciencePunk and the rest of the ScienceBlogs collective), or Nature Networks, or Discover, and then you have the newspaper blogs like Guardian Science.

I do agree that science web sites run by big organizations are less interesting though. I think this is due to their inorganic nature. The blogs on e.g. Scienceblogs.com grew organically over time, developing their own communities around interesting writers. SSW seem to want to artificially create a "community" by posting a bunch of links to other people's blogs and hoping they'll reciprocate. They won't, unless SSW actually produces new and interesting content itself, or provides a platform for others to do so.

There's one obvious, vast, almost untapped source of content that you can draw on of course... the civil service. You've got umpteen thousand people engaged in scientific research in various departments and agencies - put a call out, round up about 50-60 willing to write something once or twice a month about their work, and at a stroke you've got a) interesting content b) interesting careers stuff c) better public understanding of where their money goes.

[Frank Swain]

SSW seem to want to artificially create a "community" by posting a bunch of links to other people's blogs and hoping they'll reciprocate. They won't, unless SSW actually produces new and interesting content itself, or provides a platform for others to do so.

Yes and no... We're not setting out to create a mimic of ScienceBlogs (and besides, with Sb Brazil and Sb Germany launched it's reasonable to expect that in time they'll create a UK version). I think it will be vastly more effective for SSW to operate as a pathway to the content that exists out there than to try and create everything ourselves. The end result might be closer to badscienceblogs, but even then, that's only a fraction of our remit.

However - I do like your idea of marshalling staff in the civil service to start blogs! Plenty to discuss on that idea. The old site had a stab at this from the perspective of showcasing careers in STEM, it's certainly worth building on and we have a long list of partner organisations to draw from.

[Jon(HolfordWatch)]

I do like your idea of marshalling staff in the civil service to start blogs! Plenty to discuss on that idea. The old site had a stab at this from the perspective of showcasing careers in STEM, it's certainly worth building on and we have a long list of partner organisations to draw from.

Yes - hopefully it would also be possible to draw on and to enhance/expand on some of the social media-related work that's going on in the civil service, learned societies, universities etc.

[David_Colquhoun]

I guess the answer lies partly in wnat audience you are aiming at.

I'd imagine (in the absence of any data) that the Nature network blogs are read mostly by people who are directly involved in science (though possibly by more publishers and bibliometrists than actual scientists). Places for scientists to talk to scientists are an excellent idea, but they do little for the public face of science. That isn't their aim.

On the other hand, blogs like http://badscience.net, or even my own http://dcscience.net in a smaller way, are aimed at a much wider audience. I suspect that Ben Goldacrs has done a lot more to engage the public in science than Nature network, because that is his aim.

So perhaps the question should have been, what 'corporate' blogs have been the most successful at attracting people who aren't in science?

[Dr_Aust]

What David said.

Nature Network is definitely scientist-to-scientist, but I don't think it has anything like the readership of the bad science blog "stable", and definitely not the readership from beyond professional science.

One of the reasons the "Bad Science" idea really took off, apart from Ben Goldacre's excellent writing and national platform in the Guardian, is that the issues are "real world" - they are widespread, people have heard of them, they crop up in their lives, and relate to stuff they see on TV. So to talk about the science (or lack of) underlying things like alternative medicine, or the bollocks the Daily Mail churns out about science, intrinsically targets a non-specialist audience - though it is not really the "no interest at all in science" - more, I think, people who have a basic scientific education or interest and would like to know more. I like to call this group the "Sci / curious".

Re. Corporate blogs, the difficulty is that corporate things all too often have a kind of enforced non-contentiousness (at best) or utter blandness (at worst).

Bloggers in particular typically perceive a need for writing / content to be interesting (and hence usually fairly trenchant / opinionated). All "public facing" organisations (esp publicly-funded ones) have a kind of natural tendency to feel they should be universally inoffensive, and I rather suspect that the bigger the organisation the more pronounced the tendency. The trouble is that this can then translate into either grey-suited blandness, or a kind of painfully earnest childrens' TV jolly-ness.

Whether this would be different if we had a different law of libel in the UK is open to question, but I think it would help Only the other day a bigwig in my learned society said (referrring to the content I help produce for them) "but our name is on this. We could get sued"

To give you an example of the "suppressing" effect of this, one of the Nature Network bloggers wrote a post a couple of months back about some of the stories that have appeared in the media which I will shorthand as

"txting rots yr brane"

- this was an interesting post with a serious intent. But because he had mentioned a well-known figure in UK science communication who had written some articles along said lines, and had then commented on whether this well-known person (i) had any facts to back it up; and (ii) might conceivably have any other reason to be promoting this message in print, Nature Network's lawyers took the post down. It was incredibly unlikely that the person (s) mentioned would have sued, but NN's lawyers yanked it anyway.

You can find an account of this here, and also a debate about the issues it raised about "self-censorship" here (pg 3 onwards).

[Frank Swain]

Corporate blogs, the difficulty is that corporate things all too often have a kind of enforced non-contentiousness (at best) or utter blandness (at worst).

I think this is another reason that it's better for SSW to act as a gateway to content rather than a repository. Even linking to contentious content could be seen as an implicit endorsement by BIS, despite BBC-style disclaimers that we're not responsible for external sites. However, while we do have to be thoughtful in what content we gather, I don't think that automatically means we have to be dull. The "txting rots yr brane" story isn't a bad idea for a feature, and I think I could probably cover it diplomatically.

[David_Colquhoun]

I think Dr Aust's amalysis is brilliant.

The fact is that stuff that is, within reason, undiplomatic is just more interesting to read than the grey-suited diplomatic stuff.

And if we are talking about public interest, rather than scientist-to-scientist, it can be a lot more effective than diplomacy too. People have been writing scholarly articles about the daftness of homeopathy for 150 years. Nothing happened until named vice-chancellors were accused of bringing their universities into disrepute, and the leaked contents of their barmy courses was exposed. I can't imagilne a corporate blog doing that.

[Frank Swain]

I think Dr Aust's analysis is brilliant.

The fact is that stuff that is, within reason, undiplomatic is just more interesting to read than the grey-suited diplomatic stuff.

And if we are talking about public interest, rather than scientist-to-scientist, it can be a lot more effective than diplomacy too. People have been writing scholarly articles about the daftness of homeopathy for 150 years. Nothing happened until named vice-chancellors were accused of bringing their universities into disrepute, and the leaked contents of their barmy courses was exposed. I can't imagine a corporate blog doing that.

Absolutely you're right. Which is why the goal of the SSW website should be to support the fledgling undiplomatic bloggers (and blog readers) of the UK, empowering them for animated and robust discussion of the science behind issues that affect them.