jill/txt

The group that hacked into Sarah Palin’s email, Anonymous, seems like something out of a William Gibson novel.

I’m not sure, but I might prefer to keep them in novel-space.

Forskning.no, a Norwegian web journal that publishes science and research news, has jumped on the newspapers-must-assimilate-blogs bandwagon and asked researchers to blog for them. Unfortunately they don’t seem quite sure what a blog is. Links are rare and clumsy, posts are long, the bloggers don’t respond to each other’s posts or to readers’ comments. This is a series of newspaper-style opinion pieces, not a blog. It’s not properly set up to foster the social writing and conversations that good blogs engage in.

It drives me crazy that the premier Norwegian publication for popularised science is trying to set up research blogs and not getting it right.

In one post, a professor of physiotherapy spends most of his blog post talking about his skepticism to blogging: unlike traditional media, he writes, blogs break the tradition that an assertion made in public should permit other people to respond to an assertion. Blogs, he continues, often tend towards the monologue, a sort of mumbling to oneself rather than engaging in debate.

Which blogs could he have read to get such a wrongheaded impression, you may wonder. Well, a newspaper blog, it turns out. The Bergen popstar Doddo’s blog about football, which, if you take a look, looks a lot more like a newspaper column than a blog. The professor criticises this blog quite sensibly, saying it’d be more interesting to him if Doddo wrote about something he’s an expert at instead, such as music.

So the professor does exactly what he’s criticising Doddo for and writes about something he’s not an expert at: blogging. Hopefully his next post will be about his research on physiotherapy instead.

Another of the research bloggers writes about waiting in line at the US embassy in Oslo and being sent off because her bag was too big. It’s quite a well-written little blog post, in the personal diary style, but what on earth does it have to do with research? Surely at least the first posts in a research blog should establish it as discussing research in some sense or another?

There are a number of things Forskning.no could have done to improve things:

1. Run a small seminar for the invited bloggers or at least sent out some guidelines explaining what blogging is. (Perhaps this was done: if so I’d love to see the guidelines.)
2. Tell bloggers to use links!
3. Foster a conversation. Ask guest bloggers to at least sometimes respond to each other’s posts rather than write with no context. If staff members are blogging too, they should be particularly active in this, especially in the beginning when you’re just starting to build a community.
4. Set up a technical system that makes linking easy, and where trackbacks work. Such a system should alert your bloggers to posts on other blogs that reference their post so that it’s easy for your blogger to respond either in the other blog or in a new post on your blog.
5. Insist that if readers respond to a blog post, the blogger should ANSWER, especially if their post, like that of the professor of physiotherapy, is about how blogs tend to be monologues and you hate mumbling monologues.
6. Pay bloggers. The professor of physiotherapy notes that this, like so many other outreach activities, is unpaid yet not really counted as “work” by the university. Seriously, if you expect researchers to put all this work into contributing content, they should be paid the same as a freelancer would be.
7. Correct typos and fix links and images shortly after a post is published (I’m assuming bloggers publish directly; as all posts are timestamped at 5 or 6 am this may not (but should) be the case.) Show the same professionality in proofreading the blog posts as with other articles on the site. If you want the blog to add value to the site you have to take it seriously and treat it with the same professionality as the rest of the site.
8. To start such a venture off well, make sure all or most of the first guest bloggers are experienced bloggers. This will create a foundation for future posts. Researchers who have never blogged or read blogs have no idea how to do it and need role models and examples.

Torill Mortensen is one of the bloggers Forskning.no promises will contribute. Torill and I are old cronies - we’ve both blogged for years, and we co-authored the first academic paper on blogging (yes! ever!), Blogging Thoughts: Personal Publication as an Online Research Tool. (In Researching ICTs in Context, ed. Andrew Morrison, InterMedia Report, 3/2002, Oslo 2002.) Since then, Torill’s written much more on blogs and of course on her main research field, games. I’m quite sure Torill’s posts will be lively and interesting, and not least, they’ll be blog posts and exist in the live web of blogs and social media. Perhaps that will pump some life into Forskning.no’s blog. Or not - it looks perfectly primed to stay a series of disconnected opinion pieces that doesn’t engage with blogging or social media in anything but name.

Other established research bloggers Forskning.no should invite to contribute are Espen Andersen, Marika Lüders and Eirik Newth. I’m sure there are others: who would you suggest?

And do you know of any examples of this kind of traditional media-driven research blogging being done well? And do you have any more advice for journals trying to set up viable “blogs” inside or beside their nearly-print-style web publication?

build a ROBOT cupcakes!

Originally uploaded by hello naomi

I might have to make some of these cute robot cupcakes I found on Flickr, via Thimble. Their creator, Naomi, bills herself as “a post graduate uni student who programs robots to play soccer by day and a ‘cupcake ninja’ by night” and has the most fabulous collection of insanely decorated cupcakes I’ve ever seen. Fellow geeks may also appreciate the Space Invader cupcakes.

So for the robot cupcakes - do you think you simply use marzipan to which you’ve added food colouring? Of course, to really make these perfect you’d want to use those edible googly eyes that Evil Mad Scientist figured out how to make.

In all the talk about the death of newspapers, people frequently argue that local news will still be of value, and more than that, the hyperlocal stories that couldn’t be covered when space (on paper) was limited. Bergens Tidende, our local paper, has a shining example today of how a local newspaper can gather and report local news simultaneously by coordinating reader participation in a very easy-to-contribute mashup focusing on an issue of huge importance to Bergeners right now, though it’s of absolutely no wider interest.

You see, we’re currently building a light rail system through Bergen, and the road works and constantly changing detours are of course causing major traffic problems. Bergens Tidende is doing the conventional reporting and interviews, but also set up a map where people can double click to show where they’re experiencing problems and where they can quickly enter information about what the problem is. They’ve even thought of anti-spam measures: you enter your mobile phone number and instantly receive an SMS with a code that you then type into the website to confirm that you’re an actual person and that you’re a different person to all the other people who’ve entered their comments. Your identity is not posted to the website. It all works beautifully smoothly and took no more than a couple of minutes in total. And now I can go and look to see whether other people are annoyed at the same temporary intersection as I swear at all alone in the car whenever I drive through it. [Update: Hm, the website I saw right after entering my comment gave a nicer interface for reading other comments than the one I can find now - could be smoother.]

Actually this is the sort of thing the city council should provide for us to tell them where potholes are too big or pedestrian crossings need to be renovated. Though perhaps having a disinterested party doing it (the fourth estate) is actually a very good thing.