blogs

I had a surprise this weekend. After years of declining value through increasing noise, I'd essentially stopped checking my Technorati stats. What had degraded almost beyond usefulness took a leap into unrecognizable territory last year, as the team started revamping its software. Yet, it now seems that the tinkering has worked: Technorati got its mojo back.

Back in the early days of blogging, all the kool kids "claimed" their blogs on Technorati. In those days, pre-2005, there was no Google Blogsearch. Not everybody had a feed yet, and the diversity of blog software was very uneven in its support for feeds, trackbacks, and blogrolling.

Topical "communities" grew mostly by the blogrolls of well-trafficked sites -- those who knew the ropes led by example, others picked up the techniques as they read. A few commercial ventures started to promote the idea of shared hosting for blogs with similar interests -- leading to the birth of the "science blog" concept, both in the trademarked and more ecumenical versions. In the blogoverse, one ruling credo came to the fore: It wasn't how many readers you had, it was how many inbound links. Links gave an air of reciprocity to the entire enterprise -- you read other people, linked to what you liked, and thereby shared their work with others. Link-love was born.

Technorati did two things well. Most important, the site provided a report of inbound links. For those (like me) who never did get trackbacks to work right, having a third-party site provide link data was the best way to find new blogs, return links to them, add them to the blogroll, and build the community. I checked the site every day, to find the conversations that my posts started elsewhere.

But Technorati's more visible accomplishment was its blog ranking. One numbered list, from one to twenty-four million, listing every blog in order of inbound links. In the early days, the list was almost aristocratic. Latecomers like me could aspire to get the number of links of more established blogs, but it wasn't too easy to climb the charts because they tracked the total number of links, not the number in the last few months. It took an interesting writer to climb the chart. Technorati wasn't the only ranking or link-tracker -- N. Z. Bear's "Ecosystem" memorably gave a cute name to everyone in its tiers of blog ranks, and other upstart rankings would appear over the next several years.

In 2006, mainstream science started to take notice of blogs. Nature ran a news story about the phenomenon, listing 50 "top" science blogs, taken straight from the Technorati rankings at the time. My position on the list, at number 14, proved to be a great advantage as I tried to explain to skeptical colleagues what the heck I was doing. It's one thing for Technorati to say you're number 14 at something, but when Nature agrees -- well, that's scientific. It made a difference.

But in many ways, that was the high water mark of the independent ranking and link-counting engine. The growth of blog "communities" gave new ways to game the system. Repeated blogrolls and aggregators guaranteed some blogs a link count vastly out of kilter with the conversation that they actually provoked. "Link trading" among completely unrelated blogs further distorted the picture. Over time, Technorati started to degrade. The worst of the problem came from spam blogs. As the spambots ruthlessly interlinked with each other, they climbed the rankings and pushed the real blogs down the list. By 2008, most of my inbound links turned out to be either spam comments (not me, I swear!) or automated blogrolls from sites that have nothing to do with science. With all this static, somebody badly needed to adjust the rabbit ears.

New aggregation services, like Postgenomic, Wikio, and others, tried to create topical lists for science. I tried many of them over the years, but each fell short -- either leaving out big chunks of the conversation, or failing to fix problems with incoming feeds. I'm running stock Drupal, but for some reason many third-party sites can't index my feed and won't give me any service to figure out why. Does anybody care? Heck no -- the point of these sites is either to test algorithms or to place advertisements. Technorati was just as mercenary as any of the others, but at least they got it right -- even when I was running Bloxsom with RSS 0.85 cobbled in Perl. But this same accessibility may have made the site's Achilles heel: spambots were pinging ten times as much as the real blogs.

Last year I'd almost given up on finding incoming links. Google gives me a daily digest, but their indexing misses a surprising number of people, even those with well-established sites who write every day. I would sometimes discover that somebody had linked to me weeks before. Often I'd write, or go and put up a comment -- but after days the opportunity for conversation may already have passed by.

There were signs that other people had the same problem. Blogs no longer seemed the conversational tools they once had been -- people were taking true conversations onto Twitter. The social web started to draw people into backchannel conversations, inaccessible to ordinary readers. Fewer and fewer of the established science blogs seemed to explain things from the beginning. For those of us who may not want to "follow" or "friend" each other all the time, the web started to seem like a lonely place. Was there still room for a real correspondence, with revision and thought over time, instead of jotted into 140 characters?

Seeing the last few days of incoming links, all in one place, makes me feel a lot better. It was just chance -- really, looking for some blog coverage of how Sketchbook Pro works on the new iPad -- and there they all were. My inbound links! No spamblogs, no endless list of blogroll links. Now I'm back to discovering new blogs, from people who are engaging with my field. Old friends may have gone over the last few years, or have cut back their online writing as they moved from graduate school into industry or the tenure track. But new ones are rising to take their place. The aristocratic element of the ranking has relaxed -- the new Technorati algorithm is ignoring blogrolls and is instead reading feeds for new links. That gives it an immediate quality, and a blog's rank will ebb and flow with the conversation it provokes.

After all this time, I'm still in the top 14 for science.

Read some blogs. You’ll find they all have different styles, different scopes, and different voices. Some scientists write blogs mostly about politics or religion. Others write mainly for educators, or for the public, or for their students. Some write mainly for other professionals, others include lots of pictures of their cats.

There are probably a hundred different approaches to blogging that might add to your scientific career, and you just have to find the voice that will work for you. In this series, I’m not advocating for any particular blogging style. Instead, I’m outlining strategies to help turn your own particular style into an asset for your research and your tenure dossier.

I've received a tremendous response to my essay earlier this week, the first part of my series on blogging and tenure. I wanted to thank everyone for their congratulations. More important, I got a lot of questions.

Some of these questions will be answered during the series -- strategies for writing, ways to quantify your blog's impact, framing the right comparisons for your committee, and how to broaden the impact of your research.

But I also got a few questions that I hadn't been intending to write about. Still, the topics are so interesting that I have to try!

The first has to do with anonymity as a graduate student and blogging.

This is the first of a four-part series on blogging and tenure. Each installment covers a different portion of the tenure process, from starting and establishing the tone of your blog, up to documenting your blog for your tenure dossier. I don't guarantee anything, and I certainly don't have all the answers, but I worked hard to develop some strategies in my tenure chase, and you may find some of them helpful.

Last month, the University of Wisconsin officially granted me tenure. So, I can say without any doubt (if other examples had not been sufficient), it is absolutely possible to write a daily, high-profile blog and still be recognized by your colleagues as a scholar. In fact, it is possible to blog, do good research, and earn tenure at a Research I university.

That seems like progress, compared to the situation four years ago when I began blogging. A few high-profile tenure denials in late 2005, including physicist Sean Carroll and political scientist Daniel Drezner, made it seem like a blog might be the kiss of death for a research reputation. Inside Higher Education ran a story on the subject, as did Slate, with the melodramatic title, "Attack of the Career-killing Blogs". Since I was interviewed in that article, I suppose I should have been a little nervous (I wrote about it here).

Happily things have changed. With the rise of science blogging, people have become much more aware of the ways that a blog can contribute to a career in science. If you establish a readership, the chances are your colleagues will find out about your blog themselves, instead of looking at you in befuddlement. Blogs are not research, but in some fields they have become an important part of the process of networking and critical commentary. A well-written blog is far from a liability to a scientific career, and may be a real boon.

However, the transition to a blogging professoriate has barely begun. A large fraction of today's science bloggers are graduate students. Some have finished their degrees within the past few years, moved on to postdocs and to assistant professorships. Starting on the tenure track exposes young researchers to some unexpected minefields, and there are special challenges when a blog is involved.

Other young researchers may be reading and using blogs intensively and wondering whether it would be worthwhile to start writing. I was in the same situation some four years ago, so I know the feeling.

I'm writing these posts to share my experience. I spent a lot of time evaluating and preparing my blog for the tenure process. From the beginning, I knew that blogging would be only a minor aspect of my tenure review, because the focus of tenure evaluation at UW is research activity. My main goal was to highlight the ways that my blog has enhanced my research and public service presence, and to show that blogging does not detract from my research agenda. I succeeded in those goals, using a number of strategies along the way that may be useful for other people approaching their tenure reviews. Some of these strategies are common sense; others may surprise you.

I realize that I have embarked on a different project than many science bloggers. Most of my words have to do with my field of study. Many blogs include a broader mix of commentary, including political and social subjects. Since I'm an avid reader of many different kinds of blogs, I can comment to some extent on the ways that different subjects and tones may be incorporated into a professional career.

The full story is divided into four parts. In the final installment, which may be most useful to current bloggers, I will describe the specific strategies that I applied to quantify my blog's role as a service to the field and to the public. Over the next two weeks, I'll be discussing strategies to build a blog's reputation and readership in the years leading up to tenure review, and some ways to integrate research with blogging.

Today, I weigh the pluses and minuses of starting a blog on the tenure track, including the key question of anonymity. This will be especially relevant if you are newly on the tenure track and considering starting a blog. You may also find some of it useful if you have a blog already and are considering shedding a pseudonym and making a blog part of your academic life.

The Scientist is asking you to vote for your favorite life science blogs. Razib was kind enough to mention yours truly. They are giving you a chance to list some of your favorites -- so do stop by and recommend some.

UPDATE(2007/09/20): Wow, you guys are awesome! Thanks, you make me want to write more. I don't have the most links out there, but my traffic data are always a lot higher than most, so I know you keep coming back. Thanks for letting everybody know!

For the next week, the Just Science aggregator (feed) will be picking up posts from a few dozen science blogs, who have committed to a post a day of just science content. I'll be participating, and while daily science content is nothing unusual here, it may be a great opportunity to find other interesting blogs that you haven't noticed before. Lots of interesting writing about science, all collected in one place -- sounds like a winner!

I found out from a reader this morning that Dennis Etler has a blog called "Sinanthropus" -- and it's excellent! If you haven't seen his long-standing website, "The Fossil Evidence for Human Evolution in China", you should check that out too. Both are full of insights!

Oh, and the number of hominid-inspired blog names is quickly decreasing, so start now if you want one. I happen to think that "Cyphanthropus" would be a cool blog name. For someone a little bit self-absorbed, there's always "Primigenius"...

Another in the series of "10 questions" interviews, this one with Steven Pinker. It touches on the politics of gender at Harvard, his upcoming book, and includes this quote-of-the-day candidate:

It's tremendously gratifying when a seemingly ugly pattern of data suddenly reveals itself as the predicted outcome of an elegant underlying process.

The Jane Goodall Institute has a blog, which has been updated daily for some time. According to the description:

Gombe scientists tell us about their work, daily chimp dramas, the beauty of the landscape and the struggles they experience and observe. Jane drops in now and then, too.

There is a lot of content in the daily entries, really like a diary version of field notes. I'm pasting a sample, which gives the flavor of just how interesting it is, especially if you have seen documentary footage of these chimpanzees:

Sandi is swelling again, which means she has attracted quite a following. Every male (Kris, Freud, Tubi, Frodo, Wilkie, Gimble, Apollo, Sheldon, Kris, Faustino, and Pax) is closely following her every move. Even the adolescents Ferdinand, Titan and Zeus are waiting in the wings for their chance to sneak a copulation with her at the risk of aggression from the adults. The day was filled with mating, and of course the alpha male, Kris, was most active. When the males were not trying to copulate with Sandi, they were busy fighting each other, trying to keep each other away from Sandi. These fights were impressive, with males chasing each other out of trees, many of them crashing down into the bushes below in their hurry to escape the aggression of another. It certainly is an interesting show, although all the chaos can make it difficult to observe who is actually doing what.

I really recommend it; it's like a chimpanzee soap opera. The only downside is that the entries require Google Earth to read them. This allows the cool map integration that Google Earth does so well, but it seems superfluous here, since the entries don't depend crucially on their locations within the reserve.

I assume that Google must have contributed some money for this, so I wish them well, but it does make it harder to read.

Dienekes came up with his own set of predictions for next year. I have to say I love this one:

At least one paper from the Genographic project in a venue other than National Geographic about some obscure people that no one has heard about but everyone will talk about for days. The paper will have a feel-good message about the unity of mankind.

I wish I had thought of it!

The American Museum of Natural History has set up a Darwin website to accompany their Darwin exhibit. It's pretty good -- not too heavy on detail, and nicely put together. The teaching resources look very useful for K-12 teachers, and there are links to other locations.

So it might be worth checking out.

The Freakonomics guys have a blog, and this week they are having guest posts from Seth Roberts, who has developed a new diet through self-experimentation. Usually I don't go for that kind of thing (and I don't endorse any diet), but he has an interesting anecdote today about science, acne, and experiment.

I point to it because it refers to biological anthropologists as the kind of scientists who are more "with it" than medical researchers:

A few months ago I saw a dermatologist about a different problem. I couldn't resist: What causes acne? I asked. Well, not diet, he said. I knew this was false. And, really, how could you say such a thing without testing hundreds of different diets -- at least? Which no one had. Several years ago I asked my friend Katharine Milton, a Berkeley anthropologist, whether the indigenous people she studies have acne. No, she said, unless they eat foreign food. The anthropologist was right, the doctor was wrong. The situation reminded me of something in an NIH-sponsored online medical encyclopedia: dental malocculsion, it said, "is most often hereditary." Whereas the work of Robert Corruccini, a professor of anthropology at Southern Illinois University, such as this, had convinced me that dental malocculsion is due to soft food.

I like to point out when we shine.

August seems to be a month of self-reflection. Maybe it's that everyone is on vacation. There certainly hasn't been much anthropology news, although work here continues.

There has been a recent string of posts elsewhere on the motivations behind blogging in science, and it's worth reading some of them. They come after this recent article in The Scientist (registration required), which focused on blogger Derek Lowe, a pharmaceutical researcher. Lowe now has his own followup, with links to other opinions. Here's a sample:

Chad Orzel goes on to note that large numbers of people see science as something that's difficult, boring, and beyond them, so they just tune out. I'm afraid he's right. But I used to explain my experiments to the janitorial staff when I worked late at my first job, which showed me that this didn't have to be the situation. To be sure, none of my explanations started off with the phrase "Consider the Hamiltonian. . .", but none of my conversations with my colleagues start that way, either, not if I can help it.

...

So when I found out about blogging, I didn't hesitate very long before jumping in. Here was a chance to do just the kind of thing I did when talking to people one-on-one, but for as many visitors as cared to stop by.

I try to describe some difficult stuff here. If I were getting paid for it, I'm sure I could make it more understandable; but as it is, I certainly try.

The post includes this great comment, that sums up some of the most important effects of scientists themselves communicating what they do.

I can't think of a worse way to make science more attractive than by a stepped-up attack on God, ghosts and the Loch Ness monster. People perceive (correctly) that "skeptic" types (a group which, in my experience, has minimal overlap with real scientists) use science as a club to attack the sensibilities of others and aggrandize themselves. I want people to think of science as something that makes the world richer and fuller, not thinner and bleaker.

Cheers to that.

I posted on the three-part PBS special "Guns, Germs and Steel," but I didn't watch it myself. I tried for a few minutes, but it didn't grab me. Maybe I'll catch a rerun.

In the meantime, a fairly intense set of online discussions have grown up around GGS. It seems to have begun with this post at Savage Minds. It has a great beginning:

Has this ever happened to you? You are at a party, or perhaps a family gathering, or maybe even just standing in line at the DMV when the person next to you strikes up a conversation. If they don't start talking to you about Indiana Jones at the mention of anthropology, there is a fair chance they'll bring up GG&S - expecting that you just love the book. Now you're in a pickle. Diamond showily positions GG&S as the definitive anti-racist take on human history. If you say you don't really care for it, your interlocutor is likely to get a slightly baffled look on her face. What could you possibly mean, you don't like Diamond's noble tome? Are you... a racist? To explain why you don't like the book would take more time than most people making friendly small talk want to spend, and - worse yet - your explanation will necessarily impugn the motives of people who do like it, a group that you now know includes the person with whom you are speaking. My own usual reaction in such encounters is to say that unfortunately I have not read the book but that boy, it sure does sound interesting.

It even quotes me, the part of my post that connects Diamond's ideas to early 20th century anthropology. The point of citing me is to skewer the connection, but I don't buy it. Diamond borrows very freely from pre-postmodernist cultural anthropology; most of what he writes in GGS is no news to anyone who has had a first course in theory. Sure, Boas emphasized cultural differences (as opposed to ecological or environmental differences) to explain differences in cultural products like folk art. But what is there to explain cultural differences themselves? Let's ask Boas himself:

Ethnological phenomena are the result of the physical and psychical character of men, and of its development under the influence of the surroundings...'Surroundings' are the physical conditions of the country, and the sociological phenomena, i.e., the relation of man to man. Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered (Quoted by Answers.com from "The Principles of Ethnological Classification").

Boas certainly emphasized culture as an explanation rather than geographic determinism. And historical connections among cultures provided a reason to reject law-like evolutionary progressions of societies. But his rejection of racism did not depend on the primacy of culture: it depended upon the availability of alternative causes for racial differences. One of those was the suggestion that racial features were influenced directly by the environment; a finding that emerged from his study of immigrants. Another is history itself: by applying historicism directly to cultures that lacked a written history, he enabled the examination of the reasons for present material differences between groups.

Here I am reminded of Kroeber's -- Boas' student -- curious fascination with the fire drill and the number of times it was independently invented versus diffused to different societies. This mode of explanation is clearly very similar to that applied by Diamond. Diamond is not an ethnographer, and doesn't care about particular cultures or events, except as examples to bolster his broad trends. But Boasian anthropology was not entirely about ethnographic description or cultural particularism; these particulars were meant to be employed in pursuit of broader goals. Not the broad goal of explanation of history, but the broad goal of debunking racist theories. Of course, Diamond attempts both.

There is a key difference between Boas' and Diamond's theories: a difference in the questions they consider to be important. Boas was concerned with explaining present disparities among human groups; for this, he viewed the history of colonialism to be more than sufficient. Diamond is concerned with explaining why some groups became the colonizers, and for this, he must turn to more distant historical explanations. Again, I think Diamond's work has weaknesses within this historical framework, but I also think it is a lot closer to traditional anthropology than some find comfortable.

On the other hand, I accept the critique of my use of "a strongly Marxist element" to describe his hypothesis. Outside of Marxist anthropology, few take note of the difference between strict and vulgar materialist approaches, and this one is definitely in the vulgar materialist school. A caution to me about the problems of overspecialization.

But I'm not much of a target; my post briefly explained my problems with the book's premise. For the most part, that qualifies me as a "friendly", I guess.

Other blogs have taken each other on more directly. Brad DeLong posted a critique of the critics, which cuts pretty deep. Crooked Timber has a side discussion of the critics and their critics. Nomadic Thoughts has a brief review of the whole thing, with references to his own reviews of the TV miniseries, if you are interested in the series itself. And Savage Minds weighed in with a second post focusing on the problems of ignoring within-society variation in material wealth.

What I like about the back-and-forth is that many of the posts and commenters actually provide references. (What I don't like is how few of them seem to have read these references.) These posts aren't expert opinions; mine isn't either. But they give an impression of the reaction of anthropologists to GGS, and they give an avenue toward finding real expert critiques of Diamond's theory. And it's all free, so I'm happy to point it out to anyone who's interested.

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running this pseudonymous column discussing the perception of blogs by academic hiring committees. It includes some important cautions:

A candidate's blog is more accessible to the search committee than most forms of scholarly output. It can be hard to lay your hands on an obscure journal or book chapter, but the applicant's blog comes up on any computer. Several members of our search committee found the sheer volume of blog entries daunting enough to quit after reading a few. Others persisted into what turned out, in some cases, to be the dank, dark depths of the blogger's tormented soul; in other cases, the far limits of techno-geekdom; and in one case, a cat better off left in the bag.

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose of broadcasting one's unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world? It's not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such a forum. But it's also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of uses.

The column has an interesting point of view -- one that may be typical of many senior faculty -- in that it significantly underrepresents the diversity of the blogosphere. It unfailingly describes blogs as full of personal rants, unprofessional smears, and irrelevant tripe. Reading this, you would have to conclude that anyone who bothered writing regularly online is either a narcissist or a closet jerk:

We all have quirks. In a traditional interview process, we try our best to stifle them, or keep them below the threshold of annoyance and distraction. The search committee is composed of humans, who know that the applicants are humans, too, who have those things to hide. It's in your interest, as an applicant, for them to stay hidden, not laid out in exquisite detail for all the world to read. If you stick your foot in your mouth during an interview, no one will interrupt to prevent you from doing further damage. So why risk doing it many times over by blabbing away in a blog?

But of course, the same thing could be said of any kind of accessible writing. After all, what motivated this author to write a pseudonymous column for the Chronicle?

The article has an important message, though. If you are pursuing an academic career, and you are interested in writing online, then you can't assume that the two will be symbiotic. Clearly you can enhance your prospects with a good blog -- one that is very carefully written, that retains a serious professional perspective, and that gives credit to others where it is due.

But your effort must be both highly consistent and integrated into your academic mission. There are a lot of irrational attitudes out there about blogging right now, many of them widely represented in the academy. In the column, one candidate fares poorly because of what someone else wrote about them in a blog, while committee members voiced concerns that any blog, no matter how professionally written, might be used as a forum to "air dirty laundry." In any academic committee, there is a fair bit of projecting one's own concerns onto others. If you are writing things you wouldn't want a hiring committee to read, you'd better be using a pseudonym, too.

As for myself, I want to thank my readers. The weblog now averages 600 unique readers a day, who view 2400 pages, and download 82 megabytes of files. In June, the weblog was read in 74 different countries. This means that every day I reach more people than will likely ever read any one of my academic papers, regardless of whether they have a university library or subscription to academic journals. A weblog is communication, pure and simple, and that is what academia is about.

A very interesting post by Pharyngula scribe P. Z. Myers that helps to put the geologic legacy of western Kansas into perspective. This is the part of the state I am from, and I have a painting of a Niobrara chalk outcrop on my living room wall. But there is nothing like considering the history of the area, with short mentions of the role of the Sternbergs in discovering it, to put the landscape into a deeper perspective. This post goes from a microscopic view of the chalk to the paleontology of ancient reptiles in the formation.

You can find out more about them at the Sternberg Museum in Hays, which preserves many of the original fossils prepared by George Sternberg. The web site could be better, but the museum is a real treat; it rivals some of the best university paleontology exhibit museums I have seen.

You can still find sharks' teeth on the chalk road past my grandparents' farm. They've been waiting 80 million years to be found.

A blog carnival is a selection of self-submitted articles following a theme of topics. A good one in the area of science and medicine is The Tangled Bank.

The current edition includes this great post with an unforgettable title: "How Evolutionary Psychology Can Make You Look Like an Ass." The article is an illustration of uninformed use of EP concepts, and a complaint about how common they are. It's short, and worth thinking about.