Yes – I’ve finally set up a blog here at NN as a kind of experiment for the New Year.
I’m probably known to some of the people reading here as a long-winded, if not always regular, commenter on various NN blogs.
But why start up yet another blog?
Well, as when I first started blogging a few years ago, one motivation is to provide a permanent home for over-extended comments I find myself writing on other peoples’ blogs.
Anyone who’s met me will attest that I find it hard to shut up once I get going.
The same problem afflicts me in commenting, as you can perhaps see here and here. And rest assured, there are far worse examples.
So one reason for starting blogging here is to be able to spin off those over-expanding digressions onto posts, where appropriate.
A second motive is to have somewhere to air my take on stuff that doesn’t fall easily within the purview of my other Bad Science type blog.
Although single author blogs are (IMHO), above all, personal – and thus have a mix of stuff reflecting a person’s idiosyncracies – they nonetheless tend to have recurring themes, and therefore often to fit well in particular blogging communities. But then sometimes one has something to say that is not really of interest to the people there… so it makes sense to take it to the place where the audience are. The politics of science and research assessment, for instance, or the annoyances of finding parts for ageing microscopes on eBay, or why I loathe talks about kinases with > 10 obscure abbreviations in them, are likely of little interest to people in the Bad Science blogging community, but might find a better audience at NN.
A third idea is that I may post science-related stuff here that I have written for publications that don’t have an internet presence, or that don’t have comments threads after articles (or the ability to embed links).
Like many a blogger, I enjoy pontificating on a comments thread (and reading one) at least as much as reading the main post – and a hell of a lot more than writing a main post. So I may re-jig and re-post some of the things I have written for Physiology News, for instance – notably historical articles. In fact I have one on Charles Darwin and the early British physiologists kicking around that I will try and edit a bit and post here as the first “proper post”, hopefully before the Christmas break.
Yay! Glad to see you’ve decided to decamp here.
Welcome to the blogger side of Nature Network!
Now we just need to recruit Åsa over from the commenter side, and we’re all set for world domination.
Excellent news Austin – I very much look forward to your invariably interesting contributions.
Long overdue, Austin! Welcome.
Er …. what they said.
Welcome to the other side of Nature Network – looking forward to lots of lively and interesting discussions.
Yeah, seconded (or seventhed by now). Particularly looking forward to some of the more historical pieces.
Congrats! (= example of brief comment, making me very unsuitable as a blog author!)
I like the idea of -recycling- using blog comments as inspiration and/or material for blog posts!
Welcome Austin. If it helps, I wouldn’t have guessed that you didn’t have a blog here already… 😉
Welcome Austin! I look forward reading your posts. (I’ve been to much of a chicken to ask about your other blog but now I can read here 🙂 )
Cath> me? hmm… but I wanted to be the “power behind the throne when we took over the world”. you know, the one who survives when the oppressed people rises in the end of the movie 😉
Thanks to all for the welcome. Hope I can live up to it. A problem with the other blog has been dismal frequency of posting, so I am going to make an effort here to intersperse the typically overlong and overwritten academic-muses-discursively-at-almost-book-length things with shorter stuff.
Re Bob’s comment, not exactly decamping, more multi-tasking. Perhaps I can take a tip from my occasional opponents in the Alternative Loony-verse and fractal myself into bits, with one blog per subreality version of myself. I sometimes have the impression that very successful Professors can do this already – several I know seem to have the ability to be in three places at once. Although perhaps they’ve just cloned themselves.
Anyway, the other blog (hereafter referred to as “The Other Place”) will be continuing to plough its little furrow, based hopefully on A.V. Hill’s famous maxim that I like to quote every third comment or so:
(quoted, as I recall, by Bernard Katz in his monumental Royal Society obit for Hill)
And I’m not ruling out the occasional thing appearing on both blogs – it will just depend on the content.
To my shame, I have only just discovered your blog. Not sure how I missed it, but from now on I shall be an avid follower. Belated welcome to NN – as a blogger, that is, as opposed to a tried and trusted commenter and stimulator of many an online conversation thread!
Thanks Maxine. I haven’t done that many posts yet, of course. I remember saying at The Other Place that I had concluded over the last couple of years that I was a better commenter than I was a blogger. One skill I have not quite mastered, but would love to get down, is the short post that generates a juicy long comments thread.
Anyway, I do have a history piece I just wrote on AV Hill and his earliest papers to re-tweak for here in the next couple of weeks or so. And there is a back catalogue of my historical stuff done for Physiology News which I may gradually adapt/extend here as time permits.
Not sure if much “bad science-y” stuff is going to appear here, but it may do, particularly if it pertains to science communication in a general way.
PS Nice dog, Henry!
Glad to count you among the three-year-old “us” that seems to have formed. What do you know, we actually have an identity!
Perhaps you will go some ways to assuaging recent dust-ups by being the poster child for the use of getting your own blog as a soapbox rather than “hijacking” comments threads. Personally, I think a lively comment thread is welcome animation, but you still have that option.
Like Maxine, i only found your blog now, but then I noticed you only posted around Christmas time until this weekend, so it’s not entirely our fault. =)
(and we probably all had the same reason for going back to THIS post to say “welcome”. It’s a bit more cheerful than your latest…)
Interesting about the lack of readers around Christmas that Eva alluded to. In the other blogoverse I frequent, my periods of highest readership have come when I have posted several things over exactly the same Christmas – New Year period…! I’m tempted to interpret this as NN readers usually tending to read during the week and not in holidays, reflecting the often-work-related nature of NN blogging, whilst the other “arena” has a lot of people who blog and comment manically in their leisure hours. Alternatively, NN readers have lives beyond their work and the blogosphere. Take your pick.
And wonder if this relates in any way to the differences of opinion a while back here?
PS If you fancy something a bit more cheerful, and even vaguely humorous, then the latest offering you could try this.
PS to Heather – I never worried much about “hijacking” comments threads… more that by posting lengthy comments I might come over as an obsessed loon. Something that one would never, of course, think about a blogger. **
I notice the same thing re my “home” (personal time) blog, Austin – we are all a bunch of readers in far-flung parts of the globe – our posting and commenting (at our Friend Feed group also) tends to be much higher at weekends.
Unlike, I am told by a colleague who used to work there, the Grauniad and the BBC, whose blog comments come almost exclusively from people slacking at work, hence nothing at weekends. I have not checked this out, though, it is pure scurrilous (not scrurrylous) anecdote.
weekends and holidays, I should have written, in case you thought this was one of my usual mad nonsequiturs. And the reason I’m writing a non-work related comment at 1724 UTC is that I am on holiday this week 😉
Heh. I see where there are already 400+ comments on a Grauniad thread today about film-maker Kevin Smith being bounced of an airline flight in California for being, erm, too physically large.
One sees some interesting exceptions to the “weekend” rule at the Grauniad. The topics I notice that tend to get hefty comment counts at w/ends are anything dealing with climate change, homeopathy, or vaccines – e.g. for the latter check out this extended slugfest from the Observer a while back.