Two days back Bayblab posted a topic that I have discussed within me over these two years I have been blogging. The following excerpt summarizes it
[...] there are thousands of blogs dedicated to science, yet only a few are popular. And strangely the popular ones are only loosely related to science.
[...] If you examine the elephant in the room, ScienceBlogs, the trend is maintained: politics, religion books, technology, education and music are tagged more often than biology or genetics. This suggests that their primary motives are entertainment rather than discussing science. Why? Because it pays.
Leaving out for a moment what Science Blogs is or should be doing, the essence can be reduced to a question given as the title of my post.
Before trying to answer, here are two other pertinent replies to the above question. The first one is by PZ Myers in the comment section of the above post
[...] And yeah, it’s true that I don’t post as much science as I’d like right now. The science posts are much harder work, and some of that effort is currently being siphoned off into professional writing, Seed pays us a small amount for our blogs, but these are still entirely optional efforts for which we receive no acknowledgment or recognition from our real employers, who think our duties as teachers and researchers and committee members is our first obligation — and they’re right. When a few grad students with no knowledge of the demands on my time complain that I’m not writing a blog to their standards are set against the 120 students in my various classes who want me to put together informative lectures, guess whose needs win?
The second one is by Chad at Uncertain Principles
[...] The unfortunate fact is that good blogging about science is hard work, and generates very little immediate response. The peer-reviewed research post I did a couple of weeks ago took hours to write, and got almost no respose. A post consisting of a single ultrasound picture, on the other hand, generated 76 comments and four times as many page views (1,000 to 250). I got almost twice as many page views (450) from “What sort of beer should I drink during the Super Bowl?” It’s no wonder I don’t do more peer-reviewed research blogging.
[...] In the very early days of this blog, I mostly wrote about physics, with occasional forays into politics and pop culture. By the time I moved to ScienceBlogs, the physics posts were an occasional interruption in a steady flow of more general blogging.
I would have agreed with PZ and Chad. The time involved in writing a hard core science post or essay and the return of investment at the blog seems unfairly disproportionate. On the other hand, some humor or fun posts thought and written on the fly in ten to fifteen minutes have generated enough attention. But the month break after I stopped blogging at Nonoscience made me understand the obvious.
Prof. John Hawks says it well at his blog
[...] actual science bloggers raised an empirical point: they get more readers and more comments for their non-science content. Judging by results, they’re better off writing about creationists, religion, politics, their favorite fiction, or the ever-present lolcats.
It seems a little silly, but I want to correct that misconception. Blogging about actual science is not a turn-off for readers. If it were, people like me or Carl Zimmer, or Cognitive Daily wouldn’t have many readers. In fact, I get vastly more traffic for science-related posts than for anything else.
Sure, I have the occasional post questioning panda conservation tactics, and some quotes and whatnot. But those things hardly get any traffic on their own; they mainly fill in the cracks between the long posts on the front page. My experience is that people appreciate clear writing about science and will find blogs that do it consistently.
Irrespective of the topic that we write on, we blog because we want to be read. Why go public with our writings otherwise? The excuse that I write my blog just for me is perhaps a veiled excuse for our inability (for whatever reason) to write well or engage a sustained readership on the topics we write. If we write Science well enough, readers will come.
Also, there is the target readership. I would first let John Hawks explain
[...] A dedicated following of readers is an awe-inspiring, humbling thing. My readership includes some of my scientific colleagues, and I think it’s wonderful. I also have a number of other bloggers who read and are kind enough to link into my posts. But if I were primarily aiming for these groups, I would be happy with 200 readers. I have vastly more readers from outside the field, who are interested in anthropology, and who are looking for more detail than the usual news stories about the field. It seems to me that this is the core audience for a science blog, and if a blog doesn’t have much success with science content, it is because it is missing this audience.
Instead of aiming the spectra of internet readers, a wiser strategy would be to write each (science) post for a chosen readership (students, intelligent citizen, scientists, friends). This gives the blog a group of auto-segregated readers. John Hawks number is 200. We could settle on our number. Of course, in public internet we cannot (and don’t want to) stop other reader-groups from reading any of those posts, but we can sympathize when they read and complain or don’t read at all. This awareness reduces frustration for the writer and the reader and more importantly, focuses the blogger to write more (or only) on science (or specialized topics of interest). I follow now for instance, a categorization that explicitly segregates what I write and whom I intend it for.
My blog has a dedicated readership of more than 200 readers (more than I ever expected). I think most of them have only an outside interest to my topics of interest in science. From their different interests they read most of what I write, but await a science post that they all can enjoy from their respective comfort level. Such a post happens only occasionally more because of my inability to carefully calibrate the science content to meet the requirements of this audience.
I also realize just to generate traffic one should not stop writing on science altogether or move substantially away from it – the point raised by the Bayblag post. Remember, there is a dedicated readership that reads you primarily for your science content. Fun or fart is fine, but be mindful of the proportion. The logic that Bora offers while defending his blogging position at Science Blogs is appealing.
[...] What we do is draw people in with things they are interested in, then deliver them to science posts and show them it is exciting, interesting and fun – and they did not even know it before. They came by googling for “Britney Spears” or “naked Harry Potter” or something about creationism or atheism, and they stay to read posts about science. That is one of the services we as science bloggers provide.
[...] It’s been a while since I last wrote a post on a recent paper. I post a lot of other stuff and almost all of it is somewhat related to science. My readers include scientists and science bloggers, but also liberal and atheist bloggers, North Carolina and Balkans bloggers, and my Mom. Some of them like my Quotes, others like personal posts, others like a good political rant (rare these days, I know), some use my blog to keep up with what’s new in Open Access and PLoS, and others just like me for idisyncratic reasons. So, yes, I am a science blogger but not ONLY a science blogger. I am a more complicated person, and I will let all those complications get revealed on the blog. People like to see that I am a human, not just a pipetter.
Each individual blog is a personal voice. A one to many conversation. Bringing out the many facets of the person you are, irrespective of you blog on science or not, is essential to spread your conversation to more people and also sustain the interest of revisiting readers. From my teaching experience across three countries for the past 13 years (Jeez, am I getting old?) I know it for a fact that the audience likes a sincere teacher but loves a fallible human who discusses and inspires. Wouldn’t we agree that in our daily neighborhood talk we gravitate towards a congenial uncle or town grandpa who can yap with almost equal ease on more than one topic?
And that brings me to the other side of the blogging conversation. Comments and the associated success of a science post. John Hawks again brings out a clinching argument.
[...] Bloggers may like getting a lot of comments, because it gives the appearance of a conversation. But it doesn’t take more than a glance at comment sections like the one at Tierney Lab to see that getting lots of comments is not an indicator of the value of a post. If people are commenting heavily on a post, it usually means that they think they’re at least as qualified as the blogger to vent about the topic.
For instance, I already know with this post and views I may not generate a comment trail as the Bayblag post did from many of the science bloggers or their readers. I don’t want to. My 200 odd readers don’t heavily comment on every of my post. John Hawks mentions why.
