{"id":284,"date":"2009-07-10T05:44:10","date_gmt":"2009-07-10T05:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/07\/10\/on_twitter_redux\/"},"modified":"2009-07-10T05:44:10","modified_gmt":"2009-07-10T05:44:10","slug":"on_twitter_redux","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/2009\/07\/10\/on_twitter_redux\/","title":{"rendered":"On Twitter, redux"},"content":{"rendered":"

I ran a brief and unscientific poll last week<\/a>, much to Cath’s<\/a> chagrin. It wasn’t as bad as she would have you believe, because I actually did think about the questions in those couple of teeth-brushing minutes, and figured I could pull out some information: obviously a more sophisticated and less self-selecting poll would be more valuable, but we’re talking about Twitter<\/em> here, for goodness’ sake.<\/p>\n

\nAnyway, let’s have a look.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nProfession of Twitterers (or ‘Scientwists’)<\/em><\/p>\n

\nGiven the way the question was phrased, and the possibility of an ‘ex-bench scientist’ being also one of the other categories, I was not surprised to find that the numbers from the ‘professions’ category did not match the numbers in ‘disciplines’. However, it’s pretty obvious that of the ~80 respondents, about two thirds self-identified as research scientists. Not many medics\u2014but quite a few people who have left scientific research.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nSelf-discipline<\/em><\/p>\n

\nI’ve always suspected that biologists were pretty web-savvy, even back in the dark days of Gopher and NCSA Mosaic. More twitterers self-identified as ‘bioscience’ than all the other categories combined. These data should be interpreted with caution because those who saw the poll are probably more likely to be biological scientists anyway, simply because my two seed twitterers (rpg7twit<\/a> and f1000<\/a>), and hence their followers, are biomedical. Perhaps this result is not, then, that surprising.<\/p>\n

\n\"\"
\nProfessional<\/em> vs personal use<\/em><\/p>\n

\nThis result surprised me a little bit. It seems that most scientwists<\/a> mix and match business and pleasure. Only nine votes\u2014a bit over 10%\u2014claimed separate work\/personal accounts.<\/p>\n

\nIf I get a round tuit, I’ll re-do this poll in a more sensible way, and get some non-squishies to seed it. Maybe I could present this at SoLoConf ’09<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\nAll my supplementary information is freely available online<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I ran a brief and unscientific poll last week, much to Cath’s chagrin. It wasn’t as bad as she would have you believe, because I actually did think about the questions in those couple of teeth-brushing minutes, and figured I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/rpg\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}