Blogs: a new(ish) niche in the scientific communication

ecosystem

Jeremy Fox

University of Calgary

Blog: dynamicecology.wordpress.com

0. A potted history of blogs(according to Wikipedia)

•Blog: A website where one or more authors ("bloggers") post pieces of writing ("posts") for anyone to read and, usually, publicly comment on•Prehistory: Usenet, BBS, email lists like Ecolog, Evoldir•1994: advent of web browser leads to online diaries

-Justin Hall (Swarthmore undergrad)•1997: "weblog" coined•1999: shortened to "blog"•1999: blogger.com and other sites make online publishing easy•Commentary on news, politics, popular culture•Oldest science blogs are 10+ years old

1. An accidental blogger

I will now date myself

• Telnet for “electronic mail”

Oikos Blog

2. Dynamic Ecology

A team effort

Brian McGillUniversity of Maine

Meghan DuffyUniversity of Michigan

• Plus guest authors, and hundreds of commenters

Dynamic Ecology by the numbers

• 826 posts (~20/month)

• ~35,000 pageviews/month (>540,000 all time)

• ~18,000 unique visitors/month

• 8,900 comments all time

• Readership still growing

• Could show you more stats later...

3. Are blogs dying?

2004 2009 2013

Blogs are so 2009

Weekly Google searches on "blog", 2004-2014

Rel

ativ

e se

arch

vol

ume

(max

= 1

00%

)

Science blogs are so 2009R

elat

ive

sear

ch v

olum

e (m

ax =

100

%)

Weekly Google searches on "science blog", 2004-2014

2004 2009 2013

Rel

ativ

e se

arch

vol

ume

(max

= 1

00%

)Competitive replacement?

2004 2009 2013

blog

Twitter

Tumblr

The blogging shake-out

4. The blogging niche

"And NUH is the letter I use to spell nutches,Who live in small caves, known as niches, for hutches..."

-Dr. Seuss, On Beyond Zebra

Four “niche axes” of scientific communication

Informal Formal

Priv

ate/

clos

edP

ublic

/op

en

Slow

Fast

Two-way

One-waypapersbooks

Social media

conversationsemail

preprintsblogs

talksposters

5. Blogs from before there were blogs

John Lawton’s View from the Park(Oikos, mid-90s)

•Also: Dan Janzen's Thoughts from the Tropics (Oikos, mid-80s)

Opinion and perspectives pieces

Humor, satire, rhetoric

Why are juveniles smaller than their parents?

(Ellstrand 1983)The Spandrels of San Marco (Gould & Lewontin 1979)

“Information theory, photosynthesis, and religion” (Elias 1958) “Isadore Nabi”:

Debate and discussion

“Anything you can do I can do better!”(well, some things anyway)

“Gentlemen, we can rebuild him. We have the technology…Better than he was before. Better,

stronger, faster.”

Popular Dynamic Ecology postsmath :-(

E. O. Wilson vs. math

The 80 hours/week myth

Ecology teaching videos Statistical machismoHow to suggest referees

How I almost quit science

…and of course:zombie ideas in ecology

6. Reflections on “zombie ideas in ecology”

The intermediate disturbance hypothesis (IDH)

• IDH (Connell 1978): species diversity is, or should be, a humped function of disturbance frequency or intensity

• Hugely influential– intuitive– some now-famous early studies found the predicted pattern– spawned much research– now in all the textbooks

• …and wrong– <20% of empirical studies find a humped pattern– three main theories purported to predict a humped pattern are

logically invalid – fourth main mechanism (competition-colonization trade-offs) is

valid, but models of it mostly don’t predict humped pattern

• Published refutations are little-cited or explained away

Zombie ideas in ecology

The meme takes off

Luke Harmon talking about zombie ideas at the ASN meeting

Reflections on zombie ideasFor better or worse, the joke reflects:•My background•My personality•My way of writing•My views on blogs•My views on science

7. The future of blogging

xkcd.com

Economics has a blogosphere…

…ecology has blogs

• Short answer: Maybe, but probably not.• Longer answer: Ask yourself the following questions:

– Why do you want to blog?– Do you care if anyone reads it?– Do you really want to do it?– Do you have something to say?– How well and quickly do you write?– How self-confident are you?– Are there others who want to do it with you?– Can you live offline with whatever you plan to say

online?– Do people whose opinions you care about support it?

Should you blog?

Questions?

Comments?

0

20000

40000

7/20

129/

2012

11/2

012

1/20

133/

2013

5/20

137/

2013

9/20

1311

/201

31/

2014

Pageviews

Unique visitorsMon

thly

pag

evie

ws

or u

niqu

e vi

sito

rsA growing readership

• ~700-1500 unique visitors/day, 4000-8000/week

A global readership

50%

9.5%8% (UK)

4.1%

28.4% (ROW)

From a survey, our regular readers are:•40% graduate students•30% postdocs•20% faculty•10% other (non-academics, undergrads...)

•75% male (!)

Who reads Dynamic Ecology?

Readership of blog posts vs. papers

vs.

Readership of blog posts vs. papers

Dynamic Ecology vs. PLoS One ecology papers •2 posts in top 1% (11,000+ views)•10 posts in top 5% (4000+ views)•80+ posts in top 50% (1000+ views)

Dynamic Ecology vs. PLoS Biology•2 posts in top 10%•80+ posts in top 95%

Objections to blogs

“I am terribly concerned at present about the lack of control in scientific publication. Science has always been aristocratic. Not everyone could get his ideas published in effective journals…Today anyone can publish anything…[T]here is often so much noise one cannot hear the signals.”

-Harold Urey, Nobel Prize-winning chemist

…writing in 1964

(he was complaining about scientific journals, not blogs)

Blogs are just vanity publishing!

“[W]hen almost every person who can spell, can and will write, what is to be done? It is difficult to know what to read, except by reading everything…A book produces hardly a greater effect than an article, and there can be 365 of these in one year. He, therefore, who should and would write a book…now dashes down his first hasty thoughts, or what he mistakes for thoughts…[N]ot he who speaks most wisely, but he who speaks most frequently, obtains the influence.”

-John Stuart Mill, writing in 1836(his target was newspapers, not blogs)

Too much stuff is published these days!

But some have welcomed blogs

“Thanks to its rapid diffusion the world is endowed with a treasure house of wisdom and knowledge, till now hidden from view.”

-Werner Rolewinck …in 1474

(he was talking about the printing press, not blogs)

"The world is always coming to an end."

Nobody reads your blog (or your paper)

Adamic & Huberman 2002, Peterson et al. 2010

Citations (log scale)

Pro

port

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of p

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(log

sca

le)

Visitors (log scale)P

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f we

bsite

s (l

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