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Lab Rat Lecture

Last month I had the privilege of being invited as a speaker for the Blogging Microbes event at the University of Nottingham. Hosted by Ivan Lafayette it was a great discussion of the role of blogs, twitter, and podcasts in communicating science, particularly microbiology, to a wider audience.

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American


Last month I had the privilege of being invited as a speaker for the Blogging Microbes event at the University of Nottingham. Hosted by Ivan Lafayette it was a great discussion of the role of blogs, twitter, and podcasts in communicating science, particularly microbiology, to a wider audience.

The full event is below, starting with a presentation from Alan Cann from MicrobiologyBytes (one of my favourite microbe blogs – so it was great to hear from him!) My presentation is next (starting at 09:45), then Faraz Alam from Memoirs of a Defective Brain, James Gurney from the League of Nerds and finally Oscar Rozalez from the bilingual blog Stupidity is Tremendously more Interesting. It was a great group of people talking about experiences of different social media in different blogging environments – from the more academic writing focusing on papers and twitter conversations, to more social writing including some information on avoiding being sued.


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One of the most interesting discussions we had was on the purpose of twitter: should it be for conversations and discussions, or for broadcasting work and sharing links? Like many aspects of blogging, I believe it depends on what you want to do with your blog, and what kind of audience you want to reach. Audience is a vital part of writing, even writing as personal as a blog.

Disclaimer: In my presentation I speak a little about women in science blogging, however this is a complex issue and I am not a sociologist. My presentation just gives a few thoughts I had on the issue, and is not intended to be a comprehensive study.

About S.E. Gould

A biochemist with a love of microbiology, the Lab Rat enjoys exploring, reading about and writing about bacteria. Having finally managed to tear herself away from university, she now works for a small company in Cambridge where she turns data into manageable words and awesome graphs.

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