3 ms·
There's plenty of middle ground. Any good scientist is able to explain what they do to various different audiences: 1. A six-year-old 2. An uneducated layman
by hugh3 16y ago
There's plenty of middle ground. Any good scientist is able to explain what they do to various different audiences:
1. A six-year-old
2. An uneducated layman
3. A layman with the general gist of what sciencey things are about
4. A scientist in a completely different field
5. A scientist in a similar field
6. A scientist in your own subfield
7. The three other people in the world who actually understand what you're doing.
From a blogging point of view, though, there's an issue. If you're blogging about your own work then there's actually not all that much to write except on level 7, because the details of what you're doing on a day-to-day basis don't change on the higher levels. And if you're going to be blogging about science in general... well, it takes an awful long time to do that kind of thing.
- jules 16y agoI think higher level overviews can still be very useful. For example take a physicist working at CERN. He can't explain to a general audience what exactly he's working on, but he can explain about: the world is made of a couple of types of particles, we don't know for sure all these types of particles, and what their characteristics are, with the LHC we're trying to find out. Then he can maybe explain a bit about the things his own research is about. If you relate the things you write about to reality from time to time (e.g. "electrons are what makes electricity work, but they are also inside all the matter around you") then the general audience won't understand everything, but they will still get something out of what you write.
- hugh3 16y agoI agree it's a great idea for scientists to write, and to do it regularly, and for a variety of audiences. But for the most part I don't think a blog is the right medium. Blogs just create a huge obligation to update them regularly whether you have something to say or not. They encourage you to bury your the few good things you have to say under a mountain of regularly-updated rubbish. The internet is filled with blogs updated a few times and then abandoned... heck, I think I have a few myself.
- jules 16y agoI agree. A better model is "articles" or "essays" like PG does.
- hugh3 16y agoExactly. I don't have the patience to maintain a blog, but I can see myself cranking out a few essays a year whenever inspiration strikes. This actually gives me an idea, though, because the trouble with me cranking out essays is that I have nowhere to publish them. Sure, I could put them on my own personal website, but it's too much effort to create one and then find somewhere to host it... and besides, nobody would ever find it. Alternatively I could get a Wordpress blog to host my very occasional essays, but all the blogging sites are set up with blogs rather than essays in mind, so they're really non-optimal. So here's a startup idea for someone: a wordpress clone optimized towards the writer of occasional long pieces rather than frequent short postings.
- angusgr 16y agoWordpress really presents itself as a generic "publishing platform" these days, it just mostly gets used for blogs. When I was looking around for a new WP theme for projectgus.com (which only gets updated once every couple of months on average), I found quite a few "long form oriented" themes that were intended for people with the kind of use cases you describe. I didn't choose one because I think the traditional blog format works for me, but they certainly exist. If you want to go pure PG-style then you could just use some CSS and plain old HTML. (FWIW, many of my favourite "tech bloggers" only post a few times a year. Those posts are worth waiting for. Mind you, they don't label themselves as "tech bloggers". Ech, what a horrible term. ;).)
- RK 16y agoHe may have a good strategy in that he teamed up with another person on his PLoS blog. That can decrease the chance of blog silence.