Online presence is multidimensional

September 1, 2008

This is an atypical bbgm post. I am going to talk about “scientific blogging” in light of various recent events and discussions on the web on the subject.

I started blogging over two and a half years ago, mostly as a way to write about material in my head. I used to label myself a “blogger”, but since I also dabble in video/screencasts, podcasts, maintain a wiki, etc, that label is one of convenience. The point is, that by painting blogging, including scienceblogging, with one big brush, we are selling ourselves short.

Some people use a blog as a diary of observations. Others talk about specific scientific experiments (which might also go up on a wiki). Some record screencasts of their work, while some might choose to go with putting up material on slideshare, or increasingly on Nature Precedings. Others use their blogs to report news, provide commentary on issues of the day, write essays, and many other uses. Note that I haven’t even talked about Tumblelogs, Twitter or Friendfeed yet.

In other words, we need to look at online presence in two dimensions at the very least; the choice of medium, and the nature of the content. That’s one reason I was very pleased to see that Scienceblogging is changing titles to ScienceOnline in 2009. It’s much more inclusive and a better approach.

The other thing that galls me on occasion is the “are bloggers journalists?” discussion. People take things much too seriously sometimes, and just love using broad brush strokes. There is enough place for online communication and presence of multiple types, so once again a gentle reminder. Don’t think of online presence in one dimension. You need at least the two described earlier, and discussions around citability, value, etc need to take that into account