Well, the big autumn grant deadline cluster is finally behind me. Thank goodness for that. Now I can get to the rest of my to-do list: it’s four days until a big meeting with some international collaborators, eight days until a progress report for another grant is due, and a mere 23 days until the onerous task of lying on a Cuban beach drinking a mojito.
One of the other things I’m working on is my department’s new website. It’s very much a work in progress – we only just got permission to set up this WordPress-based site a few weeks ago (after struggling with the rigid page formats and ridiculously clunky back-end of the official website for several years), and I’ve been scrambling to create content in between all the grant application work I’ve been doing.
It has been surprisingly difficult to persuade the department’s students and postdocs to provide me with text and photos for their profile pages; I anticipate much hurried page creation when they finally decide they need an online presence to facilitate their future job searches. But trying to get people to contribute to the blog? It’s like pulling teeth.
I’ve circulated the Nature Methods editorial encouraging scientists to blog. I’ve suggested general themes and topics for posts, and loose guidelines related to blogging your own or others’ unpublished data. I’ve provided links to Nature Network and ScienceBlogs. My boss is keen and supportive. But I still don’t have a single solid response to my request for blog post ideas, although a couple of people have expressed general interest, and have contributed to other pages on the site (thanks, Darren!). In fact, I’ve resorted to asking individuals to write posts on topics that I’ve thought of… and I still don’t have any posts to show for it.
I never manage to make it to any of those science blogging conferences; they’re always too far away, and thus too expensive and time consuming to get to. But I know a lot of NNers have been to one or more of these conferences, and have attended sessions on how to encourage scientists to blog. I’d really appreciate any ideas you encountered at said events, or just in general!
p.s. yes, I know everyone’s busy. But writing a blog post takes no longer than going for a coffee or extended lunch.
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I manged to get this blog up and running. I think you need to find the 2 or 3 people interested in blogging, and get them going. Most people won’t bother, though. I think it also helps if you create a community, so when someone blogs other members of the group comment (either on the blog or in meatspace)
Also try and get some (nice) comments on the blog from outsiders. It makes people think they’re being read.
Thanks Bob! You’re probably right about focusing on just a couple of people to start with. I’m leaning on Darren, for starters ;). Once we get a post or two up there that aren’t of the PR variety, I can solicit comments from other people!
Any NNer volunteers for a “leaving nice comments” campaign?
OK, I get the message. Let’s see what the weekend brings 😉
I’ve toyed with this”community science blog” idea, again as a way of trying to get people in say, a research area / research group to blog – but as you say, trying to get people to volunteer for extra anything is a x!!…
I would have said that there would be more chance if it grew out of an existing community of either bloggers, or at least people who like to sit and chew the fat in a pub. But Bob is dead right that you would need 2 or 3 people who would contribute regularly.
I have come across Departments that do it, but not in science – one example is a group blog from the Ethics Department in Oxford here, where they comment on “topical issues”.
Thanks, Darren! Subtle as an Aussie prop forward, me.
Austin, yeah, we don’t have much of a sitting and chewing the fat in pubs community. It does happen, but not on any kind of regular basis. The pub instigators will likely be the same people as the blog instigators, though!
Shhh, don’t mention the state of Australian rugby at the moment… not good.
Does Australia play rugby?
Gosh.
Hey, I’ll take it from a Kiwi (and maybe even a Sth African this year), but from an Englishman?
How did you guys do in the last two world cups, again?
I sort of feel that some people enjoy writing and others don’t. In my experience it’s very difficult to get people to write if they are not naturally inclined to express themselves in that medium. A reluctant blogger is not a good one, so perhaps it’s better that they self-select?
Now now, no wheeling the
scrumcomment thread, or it’ll be a put-in to Canada.Ooh, an on-topic comment there. Jenny, I think that’s true to some extent – but I’d like to see people at least give it a try (another way of saying “just one post! Please???“. When I started blogging, I wasn’t sure it would stick – but the first few comments I got spurred me on, and the community and conversations became rather addictive.
Who, me, ref?
A reluctant blogger is not a good one, so perhaps it’s better that they self-select?
Yah, very much so. It’s not like the blogosphere isn’t bulging already.
Will you stop crossing my comments please? 10 minutes in the sin bin.
Ooh dear – I’m getting a bit worried that either Darren or Richard is about to spit the dummy. Just don’t mention raw prawns.
naw, he’s as snagged as a wombat’s tonker, mate.
Oh dear.
Ah well, if you can’t beat ’em…
Did I ever mention the CBC advert for their 2007 rugby union world cup coverage? It included the words “watch as Canada goes for global domination”. I almost fell off my chair, and told my Dad at my first opportunity, with similar effect. Now, every time he sees my husband, he asks him how that Canadian global domination is going.
Sounds like a tough gig Cath. I agree with Jenny that the best contributors are likely to self-select. But a couple of good examples could be a great inspiration to others.
… ignoring rugby comments – for now
It’s more a time issue than anything else. The last thing I feel like doing after a long day is trying to put coherent thoughts online. I have enough trouble getting through the ritual Dr Seuss bedtime story
a tweetle beetle noodle poodle bottled paddled muddled duddled fuddled wuddled fox in socks, sir!
I always tell people that they don’t need to blog.
At the job I had earlier this year, I made this site and people are updating the news posts even after my absence, but the quirky stories (cool links) part of the site still only has my contributions on it.
One of the lecturers there also wanted to set up a class blog, but when I asked detailed questions about what he wanted to do with it it sounded more like he wanted a discussion board. Sometimes, blogs are not the answer.
So….I don’t know how to get people to blog. But I might know who to ask! Cathy Bogaart runs the blog at MaRS in Toronto, and she regularly has guest bloggers. Some are internal, some external, and I don’t really know what she does to convince them, but it’s worth asking.
bq. “It’s more a time issue than anything else. The last thing I feel like doing after a long day is trying to put coherent thoughts online. I have enough trouble getting through the ritual Dr Seuss bedtime story.”
Amen to that (in a completely religion-free sense), Darren.
Expect it’s Pippi Longstocking and assorted Roald Dahl at Aust Acres.
At a departmental committee meeting recently, the desire to have a web page to keep track of and post career development opportunities for graduate students, postdoctoral fellows, and faculty was expressed. Departmental web pages, in my experience, can be clunky, and have awkward deadlines and annoying hurdles for submitting content and making revisions or updates. So I said “Why not have a communal blog?” At which point everyone looked at me as if I had
a pterydactyloid head and a rhamphorhynchoid bodythree quagga heads and a lion body, and had just announced that I intended to swim to Tasmania tomorrow, using only my hind seal flippers and an inflatable dolphin toy. “How will anyone find opportunities specific to their career interests and levels on this blog thing?” Ummm … tags and categories, mebbe?Anyway, as a consequence of opening my big mouth, I have to present an informal summary of science-related blogging to this group on Thursday, and I plan to show examples of blogs written by scientists at different career stages. A few NN blogs, a few ScienceBlogs (avoiding the predominantly political ones), and definitely not my own, as I am the laziest blogger in the ‘spherz.
Heh – you kind of walked into that one, Kristi.
You can’t possibly be the laziest blogger around, though. I am so lazy that, in your situation, I haven’t even got around to doing the informal summary of science-related blogging to my Dept. colleagues… though I’m sure I ought to.
Darren, just turn that into “a tweetle beetle noodle poodle bottled paddled muddled duddled fuddled wuddled FOXL2 in socks, sir!” and Bob’s your uncle. Makes more sense than what some (non-NN) bloggers write, anyway!
Eva, but my boss wants them to. Therefore, they do need to! (kidding – mostly). Thanks for the link to the MaRS blog, I’ll check it out!
Austin, yeah, that’s one time constraint I don’t share. Mind you, if I had any Roald Dahl books in the house, I’d probably be re-reading them instead of blogging 😉
Kristi, I would absolutely love to hear how that goes! Best of luck!
I just passed on some of this advice (plus some tips from Bora Zivkovic via Twitter) to my boss. I’ll be putting together a list of blogs by Nobellists, although my boss was less thrilled with the suggestion to show people how blogs can help them get a new job! And he just laughed when I told him about the advice to get the PIs to blog first, and everyone else will follow. A prize for post of the month might be easier to make happen 😉
I don’t know about Dr Suess, but know what I’m going to blame any future experimental failures on…
Apparently the LHC is being sabotaged by it’s own future. Wow, if only I could design an experiment so fundamentally insightful that its very success could reach back in time and prevent me from seeing it!
Not sure about that being a good blog post on a breast cancer research page though Cath?
I’d heard about this! What a tremendous hypothesis! I hope to hear more about it, probably in a movie rather than a scientific paper, though.
You’re right though, this isn’t a suitable topic for one of our first posts. Maybe later 😉
Perhaps they are worried their blogs will become self aware and try to take over the department…
Perhaps some incentive would help, a bit like last year’s challenge to “get a senior scientist to blog and we’ll send you to SciFoo”. Or “write a great blog post and it’ll get considered for Open Lab 2010”.