Aw, man. Just when I promised myself I'd cut down on the meta stuff along comes the latest "Ask a ScienceBlogger" question;
There are many, many academic bloggers out there feverishly blogging about their areas of interest. Still, there are many, many more academics who don't. So, why do you blog and how does blogging help with your research?
I should probably make it clear at the outset that I would not consider myself an academic, a scientist, or ascribe any other title to myself that makes me sound like a professional. I have no ongoing scientific research project that this blog feeds off of, but I do spend much of my time conducting a different kind of research. With so much interesting material out there (and the momentum the open access movement is gaining) just keeping up with the state of science is a demanding task, and blogging helps me keep track of what I have been learning.
As I have experienced first hand, the best way to learn something is to know it well enough to teach it to someone else. I could spend countless hours reading books and technical papers, but if the only thing I did was sit down to read most of the information would dissipate by the next day. Blogging about interesting research forces me to really focus on what I'm reading and be able to coherently explain it to someone else. The fact that I'm doing so on a blog that's open to specialists and non-specialists alike forces me to try and be as accurate as I can without drowning readers in jargon, the entirely processes helping me learn as I try to explain it to my readers.
The writing aspect of this blog is also important. The more I writing experience I get, the better, and as Jennifer Ouellette commented during the 2nd Annual Science Blogging Conference, blogging provides writers with an interactive writing lab where we can experiment with our prose. When I started blogging I had little more than the desire to write and some small portion of talent, and even though I would not consider myself to be an excellent writer I would like to think that I have somewhat improved over the past few years.
There is a practical side to all this, as well. As I comb books and papers for information, writing about whatever interests me, I may stumble across a bit of information that only becomes relevant to me later on. Rather than having to scour the web for that piece of data or quote I can just search my blog and quickly find the relevant passage, my ~931 posts serving as a constantly updated databank from which I can mine passages I have previously written. I can't remember everything, but blogging gives me a way I can search my thoughts when I get that "It's just on the tip of my brain," sort of feeling about a subject.
Like many other bloggers, however, I just like writing. I can't keep myself from doing it at this point, and I am grateful that I have conned gained the attention of so many fellow writers and readers. Science is one long conversation about nature, and this blog provides me with an excellent forum to engage in that enthralling exchange.
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I started my own blog after reading blogs (like this one) for years. I'm not especially eloquent or insightful, but I find it a bit cathartic. It's sort of the 21st Century equivalent of yelling at the TV. The improvement is that sometimes you get a reply. People thought computers and the internet would kill writing off for good. If anything, it's strengthened it.
Thanks for writing this so I didn't have to! :-)
I've discovered that a blag can serve as a kind of public external memory device. If I see an interesting paper or preprint come my way, say on the quantitative biology section of the arXiv, I can toss up a quick "currently reading" post with however much elaboration and context as I can provide. Later, when I'm asking myself, "Where was that interesting paper on such-and-such that I was reading?" I can search my blag instead of digging through the arXiv again.
Blake,
I do the same thing ... though I've found that zotero is a handy little extension for Firefox.
On a totally unrelated note, where do you usual find the photos that accompany posts like these? Did Scienceblogs set you up with an account somewhere or have you found some good free-to-use photo collections?
And jck, I agree with everything you said, especially the bit about "yelling at the TV" and how the internet has revitalized the skill of writing.
H.H.; Sorry for the delay. The picture I used on this I ripped from another entry on this topic by another ScienceBlogger. I am not sure of its origins (probably from someone at SEED) but it has just been copied and reused to denote an "ask a scienceblogger" question.
Other photos might have different origins; you'd have to ask specifically for me to tell you since I'm not sure what other ones you might be talking about.
Thanks for the response. Because you use more photos in your essays than the average ScienceBlogger, I just wondered if there was a good (i.e. free/cheap) stock photography website you used or if you find images piecemeal from a variety of sources. It seems it is the latter. Plus, I know you take a great many of the photos yourself, but the dice photo didn't look like one of yours and seemed like the sort of general thing usually found in a stock photo gallery. Anyway, that's all. Just curious how bloggers put their content together.
H.H.; Understood. I usually try to find some illustration to use if I can. Many of the images I use are from scientific papers, old and new, so when I do history of science stuff I usually try to find a relevant illustration to go along with things.
I don't really know of any good, cheap stock photography resources (I've never really looked), but if I start using one I'll let you know where I get them from.