Humans in Science

Besides let them stew in your mind and take up room on your desk for a while.

Lisa Bailey is thinking about why she posts to a blog.

If you are putting up posts that are just summaries of interesting stuff, you are not really inviting comment (except maybe a ‘that’s interesting’ sort of comment).

Egon Willinhagen blogs for slightly different reasons:

It is a way of communicating with fellow scientists, without the need the specifically address them. Open, free and fast.

and

To stress scientific nature of my blog, and many others, is that blogging scientists often cite and discuss literature, which nicely leads to scientific blog aggregators like Postgenomic.com and Chemical blogspace, which summarize the scientific literature being discussed in the blogosphere.

New in from FemaleScienceProfessor.

I still am thinking it over, but agree generally with the consensus opinions about why I write a blog. Like most other bloggers who are scientists – as opposed to science writers – (1) my blog is a self-serving and ultimately fairly lazy enterprise to try to entertain and impress other people and (2) it is secondarily an information conveyance about science matters and how science is done.

The “Science blogs and online forums as teaching tools” session (which I did not attend Saturday) gave examples of good and bad science-related blogs for teaching purposes. On the good side, and I absolutely agree, are expedition blogs. They give you an immediate, emotional feel to an archaeological dig, a space mission, naturalist excursions, or for that matter, a humanitarian mission. (And I am extremely bummed out that Medecins Sans Frontieres blogs, to which I wanted to link, seem to have had their server hacked.) I won’t get into issues of trust in blogs, Wikipedia, press releases – like any other source of information, it is important to cross-check references.

So I was thinking, even though Humans in Science is too personal and off-the-top-of-my-head to be a well-researched blog overall, it’s nonetheless a sort of expedition blog. All diaries are.

I seem to be in illustrious company. Doing science is indeed a profession, and if you’re curious about what it’s like – for instance, if you are in training and drawn to this career, you might be able to glean an honest view of what it can be like from reading this. And I get the attention I so crave. Win-win.

Posted on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 5:09 am Categorized as:General, general science, laboratory

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