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.
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.
