Comments are the lifeblood of blogging. If no one responds to our erudite pontifications then we may as well not bother (quiet in the cheap seats. Hang on, no, that’s wrong…).
I’ve been keeping a semi-professional weblog at another place for a year and a half (and a personal weblog for more than six years, in one place or another). And I’ve learned a few things about the sort of post that attracts comments, especially in science.
The top three science weblog comment baits are probably religion pets, abuse of students , and silliness about comments. Serious posts that deal with the actual science, even the human story behind papers, are greeted with deafening silence. Indeed, it seems that the best way to get a lot of comments is to get students to make fun of creationists0.
So it’s a little strange to look at the comment précis (on the left, down there a bit) and see that the person attracting the greatest number of comments on Network Nature is the mild-mannered and completely offenceless Jennifer Rohn. What, I asked myself, is going on in her Gap Minding ?
And then it struck me. She (inadvertently, I’m sure) is cast as a damsel in distress, and, metaphorically, an entire Round Table of Bioinformatic Knights has sallied forth from their disparate Camelots (these days we might say ‘IKEA’) to rescue her from the clutches of Mordred Mordor Henry Microsoft Excel.
On their ivory iMacs chargers, lances in hand and colours fluttering like so many EST s, they crest the South Downs and ride towards Astolat (it sounds better than ‘Chelmsford’), to free Jenny (or whoever happens to be this week’s distresséd damsel) from the tyranny of the bench and bring to her the Holy Grail treasures of Computational Biology, blood-hewn from the the golden plains of Silico.
There’s only one thing for it.
I’m having trouble making some mutants.
That picture in my profile? I found it on the internets. In reality, I’m 23, blonde with blue eyes and a figure that Helen of Troy would have scratched my eyes out for. I’m trapped in this lab, which looks suspiciously like a tower, until my wicked stepfather marries me off to a biotech mogul (the genetically engineered and perfect son of Craig Venter, probably). I might even be able to imagine some dragons, and a moat.
Let’s chat.
(oh, and “Help! Help!”)
0 This is a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. Unsporting, perhaps: I don’t think anyone seriously thinks Creationism is science, so attacking it on those grounds is a bit silly. Like trying to swat a mosquito with one of these . You could probably get as many comments if you were to attack someone who really deserved it, like certain fundamentalist atheists, but they tend to have a lot of support so you’d have to be really brave. Or Henry.
Oooh, kipperfeet, you’re very bold. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve been at the cleaning fluid again. I’ve told you to keep away from the cupboard behind the bar at the Empress of India halfway up Buttermole Street. But seriously, I think you’d drag up lovely as a damsel in distress.
Doesn’t Microsoft Excel come under the heading of Religion anyway? Hating it is a bit like radical atheism – you know you’re right, and everyone else is silly, and they just need to be shown the light. Or mocked with the sort of cruelty and lack of mercy normally only seen done with skewers to kittens.
Bob, I think you should know – and I’ve never admitted this to anybody, right? So keep it to yourself – that when I listen to my tapes of kittens being impaled on red-hot skeweres – I cry.
Damsel in Distress: All phantasies of my being rescued from my wallowing pool of editorial and philosophical suffering by the Black Knight have been ruined!
I will have to turn to my Excel Spreadsheets for comfort.
BK- I think you have really hit the phenomenon on the head. Whack.
Want to trade professional woes? I can help you troubleshoot through your mutants and you can tell me to stop diddling around and finish putting those bloody scale bars on my postdoc’s figures and touching up the figure legends.
I do agree about the deafening silence business. Posts I ever make about science attract zero comments while posts about PMS, diarrhea or depression usually attract one or two sympathy comments.
Then again, who really wants comments? You then feel compelled to answer them, rather than sticking your oar in where it was only indirectly solicited. I suppose it has its entertainment value, but as Henry can attest, you might attract some fire as well.
I’ve just received an antibody and am contemplating life-after-the-manuscript-from-hell again.
Heather,
as long as you’re not putting scale bars on the figure legends and touching up the postdoc’s figure, I think you’re doing fine.
Agreed, in general, about the inverse correlation between seriousness of post and number of comments.
Whether one wants to tailor one’s posts accordingly, now ….
I have no idea what you’re implying, Maxine.
Ahhh . . . as a recovering social science researcher, I feel your pain as you wrestle with selection bias.
People don’t comment much on science posts, I suspect because there is so much to know; and when it comes to a specific audience for a specific post, the odds are you wouldn’t have a pool of respondents who are educated enough to argue back
But since everyone is equally qualified to pronounce on religion . . .
😉
It’s a nice theory. But really, bioinformaticians just can’t bear to stand by whilst people analyse data inefficiently with the wrong tools. It hurts us.
Neil, I think you should have used the same link as Anna K.
Neil is right: what would you do if you found someone doing an antique PCR with a bowl of ice and a bowl of hot water and adding a few microliters of a regular polymerase for every cycle ?
Note: this person also needs a thermometer.
😉
I’m late to the discussion, but isn’t that http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/5/80 a good enough answer? I know about another one being written which deals with “data improvement” by another frequently used tool from Redmond.
“Whoso pulleth this
swordGilson Pipetteman out from this stone is rightwise king born of allEnglandThermoFisher Scientific Ltd.”I feel positively faint. Now where did I drop that silk handkerchief?
People don’t comment much on science posts.
I feel it necessary it highlight two exceptions (I am sure I have written this somewhere else…). Notice that these are whole blogs that are attracting lots of comments for each post.
TotallySynthetic
Org Prep Daily
My most-commented post on my other blog is a sciencey one, but the comments are mostly from creationists so it doesn’t really count.
Until last week, my most commented-on post here was a joke about yeast infections. So yes, even on Nature Network, scientists don’t really want to talk about science. I guess that’s why we’re on here instead of working…
I have a feeling that the number of comments a blog post receives has only a very loose relationship with the (vastly greater) number of people who actually read the post.
I haven’t had caffeine yet. Are we having a discussion about knights using excel?
@Deepkak A knight should use mysql, not excel.
I’ve thought some more about this over dinner, so I need to work off some blood sugar. I think the reason that Jenny’s post got so many comments was indeed a kind of damsel-in-distress moment. That is, she wrote a blog – and a very good blog it was, too – in which she outlined a pertinent, practical problem connected with her work _as a scientist in which lots of other people on the Network happen to have pertinent and relevant expertise, and could come to her rescue. It’s all about forging collaborations, folks, and that, I think, is what the Nature Network is all about.
Religion always generates comments because (a) people get very heated about it and (b) as Anna J noted above, everyone thinks they are qualified to give an opinion.
Humour generates comments because we scientific types are a cheerful, sunny lot, and like to have a laff.
Science posts generate fewer comments because people have nothing to say in response apart from ‘yeah, nice post’ (and so won’t bother); or won’t feel qualified to say anything and look silly, or be working in the field and might be afraid to say too much.
bq. Religion always generates comments … everyone thinks they are qualified to give an opinion.
How come we never hear from the one guy who could really help solve matters?
Two questions:
1) exactly how do you do strike through, because I have been feeling ironically limited by my inability to do so;
2) tell us more about these mutants, are they part of your plan to take over the world with cloned bioinformaticians? And depending on your problem I may even be able to offer some advice; mutating genes being something I actually know something about.
Good lord, a technical matter where I can be of some assistance!
Just put hyphens before and after the word, sweetie.
My, Deepak, what a wonderful cuirass. And Cameron, may I hold your helm?
(ah, the whole horologically challenged thing. 20 comments overnight)
Pierre said
what would you do if you found someone doing an antique PCR with a bowl of ice and a bowl of hot water and adding a few microliters of a regular polymerase for every cycle ?
I would applaud their innovation in the face of drastic budget cuts.
@Richard – brillant. Perhaps their PCRs would work better than those using expired Taq and they could stop blaming it on their Qiagen spin columns not eluting the PE buffer properly
I think the blog comments are definitely related to how well someone understands something. Someone will always comment on your blog if you post your problems with PubMed searches or Data maintenance, as we’ve all been there and have opinions, and more importantly, things that can help the blogger. Science posts are read, not ignored, but often, people don’t comment because a) it’s not their area of research and they don’t feel comfortable with it or b) the comments need to be well-thought out, which means you’ve got to read the paper, think about it, and THEN comment. Any of us can whip off a comment or two about how to use RSS feeds to make your regular PubMed searches less painful…but digesting a Cell paper and making a comment that doesn’t make you seem like you forgot what the abstract said are two different things. I rather like the “science” posts as they point to papers or concepts I might not have access to otherwise. Just my two cents.
@Richard in your post: I agree with your description of JR: “mild-mannered and completely offenceless” so far as it goes, but I venture to suggest that three reasons her posts receive many comments are (1) she is a very good writer, so busy people know it is worth reading her blog; (2) she has a good sense of the kinds of issues people like to “talk about” (including, but not limited to, “damsel in distress” topics); and (3) she participates in the discussion to her posts in a constructive way — ie she does not simply reiterate her post argument and insist she is right, as many bloggers do, so regular readers know they can participate in a conversation rather than a “preaching to the choir” or “attempting to convert the choir” exercise (equally tedious, after a while).
@Maxine: replying to my own over-flip (sorry, Richard!) comment about inverse correlations, it is possible to get a good and long conversation on a blog about a “proper” topic. The question, as you rightly suggest, is how to do that. (Maybe not by putting a rude word in the title of a post? 😉 )I think that from what I have seen, for science these topics are not usually about the research itself, unless the commenters are also working on the same problem (then the blog becomes more like one of those collaborative wikis that are discussed elsewhere on the network). “Meta” topics are more likely to get comments from interested and involved members of the community. One good example is the relationship between blogging and science communication — there are well over 100 comments to a post on his own (group) blog by the Nature Geoscience Commentary author here, many of them stimulating and interesting.
@Henry: agreed on the correlation between length of comment thread and commenter not having read the original post or discussion. On our ‘double blind’ comment thread, for example, we had people coming in late pointing out as new articles that were discussed in the post and thread, or ignoring points that had been made by earlier commenters. (Disagreeing is fine, but ignoring a relevant point to the one you are making is not a discussion but, as others have said above, a self-fuelled rant.)
I can understand why some blogs close comment threads a certain time after the post. On this double-blind post, for example, we are still receiving late comments that are stating an opinion without having engaged in any of the prior discussion. “Science is not decided by voting” (number of people in a thread who “chime in” that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS for example), any more than it is by the Spanish Inquisition (or its modern equivalents among the more hysterically convinced of the correctness of their opinions).
Just what is wrong with ‘valve’, Maxine?
Maxine, thank you for your comments about my blog; from such a skilled writer as you, this is high praise.
nudges Jennifer
whispers
I think she likes you.
How come we never hear from the one guy who could really help solve matters?
He’s working on it, but he can’t find a place to park.
Richard — “damsel” ?
Hey Maxine, this is the 21st Century, and I’m no prude.
Am I the only person in the world who can work Excel?!
After reading the comments here, I now really miss lab work. ;(
working Excel isn’t the problem, D.
right….
Seriously. It’s not a serious bioinformatic tool and never can be.
And I have an army of clones to prove it.