October 5, 2014

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.

By S.E. Gould

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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.

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