You’ll remember last time that I wondered what the point was of Nature Network, and indeed for a few months now a few of us have been wondering whether to set up an independent blogging collective that does what we think Nature Network should have been doing. The whole ScienceBlogs thing with Pepsi sponsorship came as we were talking about the technicalities of doing such a thing, and I see that they’ve already done something along the lines of what we are planning.<\/p>\n
\nI’ve just had a brief twitter conversation with Tim Jones<\/a> on how twittering and blogging eat into reading and writing time, and Tim made the point that the day job comes first. Put another way, if something doesn’t pay, it’s the first against the wall. And the problem with an independent blogging collective is that it would take some serious time (and a small amount of cash) to do it properly.<\/p>\n \nBut after a glorious ten days or so with only intermittent internet access, I’m seriously beginning to consider the point of blogging at all. Most conversations happen with twitter, and if I want to say a bit more, or engage a bit more, there’s always Facebook (with all its quirks and problems). The kicker is that blogging eats into the limited time I have for writing for ‘fun’–short stories, novels, poems, songs; a whole heap of projects that has been bubbling away for far too long.<\/p>\n \nSo is it really worth continuing to blog? I probably wouldn’t stop completely–it’s nice to have an unwalled garden<\/a> where anybody can come along and pass the time of day. <\/p>\n \nAnd I see that Dan Pollock has responded to the comments we raised on his post last week (or whenever it was. The altitude here in Colorado has rotted my mind). The interesting thing to my mind is that he claims there are long-term plans for NN, but he can’t reveal them for commercially sensitive<\/a> reasons. That’s set alarm bells ringing, and brings me back to Pepsigate and my conversation with Tim. <\/p>\n \nFirst, Dan is falling into the same trap that pissed off the ScienceBloggers–lack of relevant communication. I don’t want to be fobbed off. That leads me to the second thing: if there are really ‘commercially sensitive’ plans for Nature Network, then I want to know what that specifically means for us, the creators of the content.<\/p>\n \nThat’s all, for now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You’ll remember last time that I wondered what the point was of Nature Network, and indeed for a few months now a few of us have been wondering whether to set up an independent blogging collective that does what we … Continue reading