ScienceOnline09: Science Blog Networks, What Works, What Doesn’t
Cameron Neylon of the Science in the open, Deepak Singh of business | bytes | genes | molecules (bbgm), and several panelists from Science Blogs and members of Nature Network discussed the merits of community blogging versus indy (“Garage”) blogging.
I got a chuckle as a few participants refered to Science Blogs as “the Borg,” even by the people who blog there. On the plus side of not being part of a blogging community, is the fact that we indies have total freedom in how we design our blogs (even if some changes irritated my readers). One of the reasons I jumped the wordpress.com ship to roll my own blog again was the freedom to install whatever widgets I wanted in the sidebar.
At the same time, being a member of Science Blogs certainly has its appeal. Some participants talked about the increase in traffic they got from Sb, and others talked about how being part of Sb “legitimized” their blogs in some ways, that they could feel comfortable putting their blog on their CVs.
Comments from a few former Sb bloggers brought up the potential negatives of being part of the community, how they all get overshadowed by PZ Myers and that people assume all Sbers are militant Atheists.
Per Bora’s comments, the organization of Sb appears to give the bloggers a union of sorts. They have the power to get advertising they don’t like removed from the site, and have raised protest about their employer in the past.
My favorite line from the session pointed out that we are all online, and we are all part of a Science Blogging Community, “Google is the community.”
The last line says it all. I’ve been a part of ScienceBlogs and Discovery Channel Blogs and we are now back to our indie “garage blog” roots again come full circle. The great thing about being associated with those 2 blog networks was the increase in readership (not necessarily just traffic) that followed us from ScienceBlogs to Discovery and ultimately to our new independent home. The residual hits from both networks are about the same as the new site.
Comment by Kevin Zelnio — January 24, 2009 @ 6:01 pm
I really appreciated having your perspective at this session Kevin. It was very interesting to hear your story of going from Sb to Discovery and then to independent.
Comment by ideonexus — January 25, 2009 @ 11:13 am