Tag: blogging

Why I Tweet and Blog: Captured by Beryl Lieff Benderly

You know, many people ask me – why do I talk to science reporters so often.  They ask this and then claim that science reporters are just all kinds of evil because they always get quotes and facts and concepts wrong.  Well, that has really not been my experience.  Sure, I have my examples of problems.  But overall, I have been impressed and pleased more often than not.  And here is a great example. I was interviewed a while back by Beryl Lieff Benderly about my somewhat obsessive experimentation with social media for communicating science.  And then, of course, I forgot about it.  So I was exceptionally pleased when I saw the story come out today: To tweet or not to tweet? | Science Careers.  Beryl did a remarkably good job in capturing the essence of my thoughts about Tweeting, Blogging, social media, and science communication.

If you want to know what I think about how to not get overwhelmed with Twitter, how to not spend too much time on social media, and what I think abotu aboutb social media, you don’t need to wait for me to try to write my thoughts on the topic down.  Read what Beryl wrote.

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Grant review: Eisen may not be able to help much due to time spent on blog; Eisen’s response – blog about it

Wrote a draft of this post in 2012.  Decided to post it now since I included some information about it in a talk and it has gotten some reaction on the intertubes (e.g., Blog about science? Kiss your grant proposal goodbye).  This is what I wrote after getting the reviews back and decided, for various reasons, to never post.  In retrospect, I think I should have posted then …

Got this back in a grant review for a project that I have a minor role in:

Outstanding group of individuals, and the organizational and management structure appears sound with clear roles and responsibilities of theme faculty. There is a large focus on developing this for microbiome research, but Eisen seems to be the only team member with this expertise, and may not have the bandwidth to coordinate this on such a large project alone, especially given his high time commitment to his blog. 

I started drafting a letter to the reviewer – partly about how great I think I am and partly to vent some anger … here is the beginning:

Dear Reviewer 

  1. Fuck you.
  2. Apparently getting elected to the American Academy of Microbiology this year was due to my blogging.
  3. I have 31907 citations in Google Scholar.  What the fuck do you have?
  4. My blog is in fact about EXACTLY what we were talking about in the proposal, you fucking piece of fucking shit.
  5. Fuck you.
  6. You are right in a way – I have little time to spare.  Did I somehow not do something you wanted me to do?  Fine.  Say that.  But focusing on my blog just shows you are a …

But then I realized this was a bit too much.  I should not let this comment lead me to get defensive about my career, my blog, etc.  Plus, I was spending too much time on this.  (The above took 2 minutes and 12 seconds to write and then another 1 minute and 11 seconds to highlight and link up and ponder).  So I decided to be more concise

Dear Reviewer 

Fuck you. 

Love,
Jonathan Eisen

But then I realized,  cursing was not the solution.  Maybe love would be better?

Dear Reviewer 

Thank you for your insight.  I will do my best to spend less time blogging in the future.

Love,
Jonathan Eisen

But this still did not seem right.  So I decided that the best option was to do nothing.  So that is what I am doing.  Nothing.  No response.  No blog post.  Nothing.  There.  I feel better already.

NOTE – I HAVE SENT A MESSAGE OF CONCERN/COMPLAINT TO THE PROGRAM OFFICER WHO RESPONDED INSTANTLY AND APOLOGIZED AND ACCEPTS THAT THIS WAS UNACCEPTABLE. PO SAYS THIS HAD NO IMPACT ON FINAL DECISION. PO PROBABLY RIGHT.

NOTE 2 – I HAVE BEEN ON MANY GRANT PANELS WHERE REVIEWERS OR EVEN PANELISTS MAKE INAPPROPRIATE SNARKY COMMENTS. IN MOST CASES PEOPLE / PROGRAM OFFICERS TRY TO REMOVE THESE.

NOTE 3 – SNARKY COMMENTS ARE MADE FOR MANY PAPER REVIEWS TOO. WHEN I AM HANDLING A PAPER AS AN EDITOR I DO NOT REMOVE SUCH COMMENTS BECAUSE I THINK THE AUTHORS DESERVE TO SEE ALL OF THE REVIEW. I DO SAY THAT REVIEWERS COMMENTS WERE DISCOUNTED BECAUSE OF INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIOR BUT THAT I FELT THAT AUTHOR DESERVED TO SEE REVIEW.

NOTE 4 – IT REALLY IS TOUGH TO RUN A GRANT REVIEW PANEL. YOU CAN DO EVERYTHING RIGHT – HAVE AS FAIR A REVIEW AS POSSIBLE AND THEN SHIT LIKE THIS HAPPENS. I SYMPATHIZE WITH THE PO HERE. I STILL POSTED THIS BECAUSE, WELL, IT IS WHAT I DO.

NOTE 5 – I DO SPEND A LOT OF TIME ON ONLINE COMMUNICATION. BUT MY BLOG IS ONLY ONE PART OF THAT. I LIKE SCIENCE ONLINE STUFF. I REALLY DO. SO SHOOT ME. THOUGH I NOTE – I THINK THIS ONLY HELPS THE RESEARCH/PROJECTS I WORK ON.

UPDATE 5/4 – some Tweets about this

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——–
This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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First "Guardians of microbial diversity" award to Rob Dunn #microbiology #GMDs

For this I am awarding him the first of what will be many “Guardians of Microbial Diversity” awards here (we can just call these the GMDs). Not only will he get an award – I am going to send him a GMD gift from the various GMD doodads I am putting together.
Congratulations Rob.  Now off to design some more diverse GMD doodads. 
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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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Calling all authors, bloggers, reporters – please help with aggregating discussions of scientific papers

There has been a lot of hand wringing over whether we should and if we should how should we link discussions about scientific papers with the papers themselves.  For example, if someone writes a news story about a paper in BMC Genomics – should the online version of the paper show links to the news story?  I think so, as so many others.  If someone writes a blog post discussing the paper, should there be a tracked link on the journal site?  Again, I think so.  I think this is even more important in social media discussions of papers, which I find fascinating much of the time.   Very few people go to journal sites and post comments and open up discussions of papers.  But lots of people post comments to twitter, facebook, and other social media sites.  So why not bring those posts into the fold?

Now there are lots of efforts out there to collect comments about papers.  Faculty of 1000.  The Third Reviewer.  Research blogging. And much more. For other discussions of the issue see:

I am not really going to get into a discussion of all the ideas out there in this area.  Some are good.  Some are bad.  Some are probably both.  I personally think aggregation is going to be a very useful tool in post publication sharing and discussion and searching.  But that is not per se what I am here to talk about.  What I am here to talk about is what anyone can do right now to help with this in a very simple way.

My simple suggestion:
If you see ANY online discussion of a paper – a news story – a blog – even some smaller thread somewhere.  Find the journal article online and use the comments function is the journal has one to post  a comment saying “There was a news story discussing this paper in the New York Times.  See ….”  Or something like that.  And presto, people who go see the paper online will also have potential to find the link you post.

I have been doing this for a while.  It is relatively easy for PLoS Papers.  For example for my paper on “Stalking the Fourth Domain in Metagenomic Data” I posted all sorts of links using the PLoS One comment function.  I posted links to my blog.  I posted links to positive news stories.  I posted links to critiques.  Anything I could find.

And this worked out pretty well.

I then started posted links for other papers, even pretty old ones (I just posted a few for my PLoS Biology paper in 2006 on the Tetrahymena genome).  I have now done this for many PLoS papers as well as my recent Nature paper on a “Phylogeny driven genomic encyclopedia of bacteria and archaea“.  Now, mind you, this works best when the papers are open access or at least freely available, so that people can read the paper as well as the discussions.  But you could do this for any paper in principle if the journal has a commenting function.

Now – I am not alone in starting to do this.  PLoS One has even launched this as a formal “media tracking” project: see PLoS ONE’s Media Tracking Project | EveryONE.  Not sure how well their system will work, but any aggregation is good.  Of course, in the long run, systems that aggregate automatically using trackbacks or DOIs or other tools will be best (e.g., some journals link to Research Blogging posts but not all do), but those do not always work perfectly and some journals do not seem to like the automated approaches.  So please – link and comment away.  Become part of the aggregation solution.  I know this is not all we need to do and this is a relatively minor thing – but if we get everyone engaged in doing it, I believe there will be a catalytic effect whereby people will then understand why this might be useful to do broadly …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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10 benefits (for my career) of blogging/tweeting/etc #fb

I was recently interviewed for a story in the Scientist by Bob Grant about blogging and related activities (see his story “You Aren’t Blogging Yet here). As preparation for this interview I made a top 10 list of ways that blogging had been beneficial to me. And I thought I would post my list here. I note, I made this list in about 10 minutes so I am sure there are other things I could add, but it was REALLY easy to make the list so I think w/o a doubt there have been many many benefits ….

10 ways blogging/microblogging has been beneficial to my career:

  • Collaboration. Many of my current projects have collaborators that have come about in part via interaction on blog/Twitter. 
  • Concentration. I concentrate more at meetings since I am either planning on writing something about it, or am actually live blogging the meeting. 
  • Personnel. Some of the recent recruits to my lab have come about via connections online. 
  • Crowdsourcing. Asking questions on twitter and my blog has been a great way to rapidly find out information about a particular area. 
  • Reduced travel. I have two little kids and do not like to travel much right now for this and other reasons. Blogging and Twitter and other social networking activities help peole find out about my work without me having to travel. 
  • Outreach. Blogging and related activities are a good way to interact with public and scientists in other fields. 
  • Keeping up with cutting edge (mostly via twitter). Following the right people is a great way of finding out about the latest in various fields 
  • Great practice for explaining/teaching. In my head, I could explain anything. But when I actually try to explain in writing, I realize how many assumptions we make and how much jargon there is. Trying to explain to a broad audience is great practice. 
  • Record of my thoughts/ideas. I forget a lot of things. I am sure others do too. But twitter and my blog provide a good record of some thoughts I had on various topics. 
  • New $$. I have recent gotten a new grant mostly due to my activities in the Science 2.0 world and I think my activities like blogging, etc also could in principle help get other grants where “outreach” is important. 

Anyway – just a little post about ways that blogging and tweeting have been helpful for my career. Other examples/areas that blogging and tweeting have helped people’s careers in science would be welcome here …

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This is from the “Tree of Life Blog”
of Jonathan Eisen, an evolutionary biologist and Open Access advocate
at the University of California, Davis. For short updates, follow me on Twitter.

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