So long, Blogger! (sort of)

The day has finally come... the day that I finally give up on Blogger.

Actually that happened a few weeks ago. After continually encountering issues with Blogger, I decided to move my blog to WordPress. Perhaps this is a cardinal sin of blogging; if so, I hope you'll forgive me and visit me at my new place and update your blogroll. For the time being, I will keep old posts and continue moderating comments here (although I hope to eventually migrate everything). A new post is no up at WordPress!

Updated 8/4/10
In case you land here via who knows where, I'm now blogging at LabSpaces. Drop by for a visit, and you might just find some familiar faces and new favorites!

Hiatus?

I know. Things have been a little quiet around here lately. And honestly, they will most likely continue to be for a little while. Some things just should not be broadcast to the entire intertoobz, and I need a longer cooling off period before I trust myself to write about the insanity in my life without saying some of those things. I also made a decision regarding my career this week that will entail using my few free hours (during which I usually would blog) for other activities.

I will still be hosting April's edition of the Scientiae Carnival. The deadline for submissions is only a week away! Check here for this month's theme and how to submit your post.

Relationship questions

For those on RSS feed, sorry for the re-publish. I seemed to have mistakenly deleted this post :\

Whilst I am furiously seeing how hard I can push my computer before crashing it (aka processing and analyzing a few GB of data in multiple programs), I thought I'd leave my readers with a few questions. Feel free to elaborate in the comments section.




One point that emerged in the roundtable discussion was that each media outlet serves its own unique purpose. You choose the ones that suit your style, your personality, and the amount of time and effort you want to commit. Facebook has been a way for me to keep tabs on family and friends that I rarely see, but given its casual nature, has never moved beyond that. Twitter and blogging have become my primary connections to the online science community. Twitter is stream of almost constant chatter. It has become a place to exchange snippets from everyday life or share links to interesting articles or blog posts--the sort of things that might be of interest to other people but not needing a full blog post. Blogging allows me to share my views and experiences or to solicit opinions on a given topic. Thus far it has largely been an outlet for discussing the culture and politics of being an early career scientist. It also provides a place for me to develop ideas about mentoring and research issues and philosophies. Plus blogging gives me a chance to write with no limitations, which is necessary to developing writing skills (I might take up some research blogging to hone my science writing skills, as well). I'm very interested in hearing ways others are using social media.

The reason blogging and Twitter have worked so well is that there is a sense of community. We talk about science, but we also throw in personal tidbits along the way. Even if I don't know your real names or where in the world you are, I do feel like I'm talking with "real" people. There is a refreshing level of honesty and personality. And this is where professional social networking sites have thus far failed, in my opinion. I have an account with one or two of these science networking sites. I can't even remember my logins for them. One I would look at maybe every one to six months. Although professional networks will always be different from more casual ones, such as Twitter, Facebook, etc., they suffer from a lack of engagement. (As an aside, the people involved in setting up the NIH-funded $12 million network for scientists would do well to take note of what has and hasn't worked for both professional and open social networks.)

This is where we run into a major issue with convincing other scientists to get into social media. With open networks, anything goes. With restricted networks, nothing is going on. What to do? How do you get skeptics involved? Marketing people and techies are not going to convince scientists and physicians that they should be tweeting or Facebooking or blogging. There are many scientists who are doing great things with social media. These are the people who should be in the room telling other scientists of the utility of these networks.

Why I love blogging

The comments on this post (and others) are a perfect example of why blogging rocks. Some might view blogging as an egotistical thing, and perhaps to an extent, it is. Some might even view my opinions as ungrateful bitchfests. But spouting off into a vacuum wouldn't provide the many perspectives that blogging does. Giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are who you say you are (and given the 'insider' knowledge you express, I think that's fair), I would say argue that I could never, in a face-to-face conversation, discuss the topics and get honest commentary from the range of people and positions represented here. We may not see eye-to-eye all, or even most, of the time, but frankly I'd be disappointed if we did.

In short, you guys rock. Keep on bringing it!

(Not quite) seven months of Biochem Belle

DrugMonkey has issued a call for the Twelve Months of Blogging. Since I just joined this community in June, mine is 7. Without further adieu:

• June: The why first. I have decided, at last, to add my voice to the (female) scientist blogosphere.
• July: I don't recall ever having a formal discussion on this topic in graduate school, but I thought I had a reasonable idea of who should be listed as authors on a manuscript...
• August: A few days ago I was thinking about my lack of productivity this week, largely attributable to attending cool science talks but also failed controls in experiments and meetings with Guru and collaborators (why the hell can't a meeting take less than 2 hrs in this friggin' place?).
• September: Has it really been 2 weeks since a last posted?
• October: The editorial in the current issue of Cell outlines new guidelines for supplemental materials for Cell Press publications.
• November: Today marks the one year 'anniversary' of my dissertation defense.
• December: ... in which I pull my head out of the sand and out of my ass.