Invisible or transparent? Science & blogs

If you're into science or blogging (or both) then you'll be interested in an article by Oxford's Nick Anthis on how science blogs can be powerful tools for scientific collaboration.

Nick will be writing something for us about his experience as a scientist and blogger soon, but here I wanted to explore why institutions such as universities might benefit from having an institutional science blog.

A lot of the reasons have to do with science itself:

Science moves fast: if you're trying to reflect what's happening within any research-intensive university there are new publications, new ideas and new projects popping up all the time - publicising these in a timely fashion is hard.

Science is deep: science writing is like peeling an onion, there are always more layers to explore/explain, other sides of a story that tend to get crowded out of traditional publicity.

Science is big: if your institution's researchers are investigating everything from medicine to robots, new species to distant stars, then trying to reflect this diversity (and feel like you're not ignoring certain areas) is a huge challenge: Plus there's simply more science happening than can be encapsulated in traditional press releases or web news items.

But other reasons are more about how you talk about your institution's science:

In the world of Facebook, MySpace and YouTube large institutions run the risk of seeming faceless and impersonal to the outside world. Couple that with  (mis)perceptions about the 'hidden/invisible' world of science and you have a problem.

Science blogs are one way of tackling this: their personal writing style is ideal for telling the human stories behind scientific research, puncturing some of the mystique surrounding science and letting the personalities, passions and opinions of real-life scientists shine through.

Of course individual science bloggers are beginning to do this themselves [something we aim to reflect more in OxSciBlog in the future]. But an institutional science blog gives you the chance to draw many different strands together, to present these projects and personalities to a general audience and to link and record how these relate to an insitution's on-going goals and aspirations.

And then there's the fear factor:
People are blogging, commenting and writing about your institution and its science right now. 

You could ignore what they're saying, but isn't it better to - in an open and transparent way - engage with the scientific issues and debates they raise and join in the conversation? Isn't that a better way to safeguard your institution's online reputation?

It makes me think of an old Wired article on blogging CEOs; many of the points Clive Thompson makes about companies are relevant to universities:

'Since Internet commentary is inescapable, the only way to influence it is to be part of it. Being transparent, opening up, posting interesting material frequently and often is the only way to amass positive links to yourself and thus to directly influence your Googleable reputation.'

Lots of serious reasons, then, but perhaps I left one out: science blogging can also be great fun!

Your comments

• Science blogging, and conferences

  rpg | 25 Sep 08

  These are very good points. At the Nature-hosted SciBlog '08 (see...

• thanks

  Nick Anthis | 25 Sep 08

  Well said. Science blogging certainly encapsulates a wide array of phenomena,...

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