Tag: Twitter

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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Searching twitter for science related topics; best strategies? favorite searches?

I have been experimenting with different twitter searches relating to genomics, microbiology, evolution, and other work things and find it actually somewhat fascinating.  The key thing has been to try and find searches that pull out useful / interesting stuff but not crap.  For some topics, this is easy, like microbiome and metagenomics.  These work well for a few reasons I think including that they are technical but used somewhat commonly within the fields in which I am interested.

You can try to get a bit more specific with them if you look for the hashtag version of these words: #microbiome and #metagenomics.  This works OK for #microbiome but #metagenomics yields nothing right now.

Unfortunately, some potentially useful terms have been coopted by all sorts of non-interesting stuff. Consider evolution and bacteria, for example.  In these cases, the words are too commonly used either for non sciency stuff (e.g., evolution of skateboards just came up) or for non interesting stuff (e.g., kitchen cleaners come up a lot with the bacteria search).  In these cases, the hashtag versions are better though imperfect: #evolution and #bacteria.

The key seems to be to find terms that are used somewhat narrowly to be only about the topic you care about but are also used widely enough so that a lot of people in the field of interest use them.

Here are some of my current favorite/most useful search terms:

If you want, you can always go beyond these and do more advanced searches.  But I tend to stick to the simple ones much of the time.  I know many people do all their searching within twitter clients, and each has their own flavors of options, but for a few reasons I prefer to do searching directly at the twitter site.   

I continue to experiment with different approaches to this and would welcome any ideas for best ways to pull out useful material. 

Also, I am curious.  Do others out there who use twitter have some favorite terms they search for?

——–
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.

——–

Ego Blogging of the Month: Thanks @SciAm for following selecting me as one of your "recommended" folks you follow on twitter

Another ego blog here. I am very honored that Scientific American listed me as one of the folks they follow on twitter (see Recommended: Science Folks We Follow on Twitter: Scientific American).

The tweeterers they list are:

  • carlzimmer, science writer Carl Zimmer
  • phylogenomics, evolutionary biologist Jonathan Eisen of the University of California, Davis
  • seanmcarroll, theoretical physicist Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology
  • RebeccaSkloot, science writer Rebecca Skloot
  • Astro_Mike, NASA astronaut Mike Massimino
  • BadAstronomer, astronomer and writer Phil Plait

Of course, I agree with them about me. I do follow Zimmer and Skloot already and will check out the others.

If you know nothing about twitter, I recommend checking it out. I think it has enormous potential as a tool in science communication (e.g., see this Bioscience article on science and twitter)

——–
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.

——–