Science blogging: The essential guide - Christie Wilcox, Bethany Brookshire, Jason G. Goldman 2016

Indie blogging: On being a “Ronin”

Zen Faulkes

Over time, many science blogs have moved from individual and personal blogs to large networks such as those at Scientific American and Discover. But what are the pros and cons of blogging in a network? How does it compare to blogging alone? Zen Faulkes, a tenured professor of biology at University of Texas Pan American and an “indie” blogger, takes us through the pros and cons of blogging alone.

The renown of samurai, the warriors of Japan’s feudal era, has long outlasted the age in which they lived, and spread beyond the shores of their island. A samurai was a member of Japanese nobility who was expected to be both a warrior and a scholar. The samurai code of honor demanded a willingness to die for the warriors’ lord at any instant. Some of the most famous tales of samurai culture revolve around ronin. Ronin were samurai who had no allegiance to a lord, either because the samurai had fallen out of favor with his master, or because his master had died. The tale of forty-seven ronin who avenge the murder of their master is so famous that it made the jump from Japanese literature to a big-budget, special effects—laden Hollywood movie.

To Western ears, ronin have a certain mystique, even by samurai standards. Having no master implies freedom and independence. You can do what you want. You aren’t working for “the man.” But a closer look shows that a ronin’s lot is far from rosy. Writer John Wick has explored samurai culture in several of his projects, such as Legend of the Five Rings. He shows that ronin are, essentially, homeless people. Citing Yojimbo and The Seven Samurai as examples, he wrote, “They have shitty equipment, shitty clothes, they have to beg for food and get ridiculed by ’real’ samurai for being cowards. The whole point of being a ronin is begging for a living.”

Both of these views evoke an experience similar to that of being an independent blogger, one who is unaffiliated with any of the “official” blogging networks. You have freedom, but that means you are on your own. Being entirely on your own can feel like begging, albeit for attention rather than food. But as stories of the forty-seven ronin prove, independent blogging does not mean ending up in obscurity.

New science bloggers starting today might well be leery of being entirely on their own. They might view independent blogging as a situation to be tolerated for as short a time as possible, a stepping-stone to an invitation to blog for a network. Networks have been a huge part of the science blogosphere since the heyday of Science-Blogs, roughly 2006 to 2010. Many bloggers left ScienceBlogs in the summer of 2010, but the concept of a blogging network had been so successful that many other science blogging networks were set up. Several bloggers have switched networks multiple times, and it’s clear that networks are actively recruiting certain desirable bloggers to their sites. Several science blogging networks are linked to famous magazine and media brands like National Geographic, Scientific American, Wired, and Discover. Print may be dying, but the recognition of those well-known names still carries a lot of weight, and being associated with those names means a bigger potential audience.

In other words, it would be easy to see independent blogging as just an audition. Some see the measure of real success in science blogging as “getting picked” for a network. This is a familiar situation for a lot of prospective science bloggers. Bloggers who come from an academic background have spent their careers waiting to be picked: by universities, by doctoral and postdoc supervisors, by search committees, by the top journals, and by funding agencies. Bloggers from a writing background also have careers that can depend on getting picked by publishers, editors, and media outlets. People will often take low- or no-paying work at bigger outlets for the chance to raise their public profile.

This situation is, weirdly, an inversion of blogging’s beginning. Blogging started as push-button publishing for the people. It was a way to share writing with anyone, anywhere, without having to be “picked” first. The move to networks is probably a logical progression of the maturation and professionalization of the blogosphere, but when I began blogging, I couldn’t aspire to join a network, because there were no networks to join.

I currently have three active science-related blogs. My first, which I started in 2002, I later named NeuroDojo.blogspot.com; next were Marmorkrebs.blogspot.com in 2007 and Better Posters.blogspot.com in 2008. Since my start in 2002, I have never been part of a network. I did apply to join the ScienceBlogs network at one point, but I was rightly rejected. NeuroDojo was not ready, and only later got “born again hard” as a science blog. Sometimes I did feel I was on the periphery rather than “in the game,” but now I have fully embraced my status as a ronin blogger.

There are advantages to belonging to a network, but they may not be as great as you think. There is a certain visibility that comes with a network, but being on a network in and of itself does not guarantee readership. Ultimately, networks function best when they create and facilitate communities. To the extent that I have been successful as a blogger—whether measured in page views or that people know who I am and what I do—part of that success is because I embraced the social nature of the blogosphere. I worked to join existing communities.

A key moment in the development of NeuroDojo was when I put posts on a science blogging aggregator, bpr3.org (Blogging on Peer Reviewed Research Reporting; this became ResearchBlogging.org, which has been superseded by ScienceSeeker.org). All three of these websites compiled scientific blog posts, particularly about journal articles, into a single “one stop shop,” sorted by discipline. You could find math blog posts, astronomy blog posts, or biology blog posts. These aggregating sites provided new readers with a useful key to the diffuse science blogosphere. I noticed a bump in visitors to my blog when my posts went on bpr3.org. Prior to this, NeuroDojo had been a very inward-looking blog, very much about my own experiences as a working academic. Posting on bpr3.org shifted my focus outward. I started writing more posts about research papers, because those could be syndicated through the aggregator. The hits slowly started going up. This was my first inkling of an important realization: ronin may have no master, but they still belong within a community.

I created the Marmorkrebs blog with a community in mind: a small, scientific research community that was interested in a single organism—the all-female line of crayfish, Marmorkrebs—which gives the blog its name. This was a very niche project, but I know it has reached the intended audience. Other researchers in the field send me materials for the blog, and the blog has even been mentioned in a few scientific papers.

By far, the Better Posters blog is my most successful online project. It’s also the project that taught me about the importance of the social nature of a blog. The mission of the Better Posters blog is right there in the name: “better.” It was created to be a helpful resource for others, because constant improvement is the samurai way.

I didn’t realize it when I started, but that goal of providing aid made the blog stand out on the Internet. You see, certain things are overrepresented on the Internet. Near the top of that list—just slightly below funny cats, naked women, and maybe bacon—is snark. We geeks love to snark. It fits into a deep-seated need to show how smart we are. We want everyone to know not just when something is wrong on the Internet, but that we saw it first. Both good scientists and good journalists are trained to be critical, and learning to deliver critical appraisals of evidence often manifests itself as snark. Viral pictures making dubious claims that are retweeted and liked on social media practically beg for snarky ripostes and take-downs. In an Internet filled with snark, something like the Better Posters blog, which has the avowed goal of continual improvement, stands out.

The way to achieve continual improvement and the elimination of errors often does mean criticism. But criticism does not have to involve snark. I have often critiqued on the blog poster presentations that I found on conference websites. These were often award-winning posters, which I suspect won because their science was excellent, though their design often left a lot to be desired. Readers seemed to realize that my critiques were intended not to mock or laugh at these posters (samurai have no reason to be cruel), but to help others avoid repeating mistakes. Because of that, people started to send me their conference posters, unbidden. I wrote that I would accept posters for critique if I could feature them on the blog. Readers thus became contributors.

The importance of community was again brought home to me when people started recommending Better Posters, mostly on Twitter. The recommendations were generally not for individual posts, but for the whole body of work on the blog, and I started compiling these on a “What people are saying” sidebar. These served as the blog’s social proof. The Internet shows us that we like what other people like. No amount of self-promotion and retweeting your own blog will ever have the power of someone else recommending your blog. The biggest jumps in traffic were driven by recommendations by other people, not my own self-promotion. That’s the power of social proof.

Your early readers are important, because they can act as your amplifiers. Today one of the best ways to find those first readers is on Twitter—but Google+, Facebook, and other social networks could be catching up fast. Regardless of where your readers come from, remember to thank, whenever possible, the people who recommend your work.

There are many other ways to interact with the larger community as a ronin blogger. Write posts that are reactions to other people’s posts. Do not be afraid to write about the same stuff other people are writing about, like the latest scientific controversy. Just make sure that you have your own voice and your own angle. Comment on other people’s blogs. Link out to related posts—a lot. And interact with people not just on blogs, but also on lots of other forms of social media, like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, or whatever strikes your fancy. A ronin need not be a hermit.

Communities are built on common interests. The more shared interests, or the deeper those shared interests, the stronger and tighter the community. Consequently, you may be able to build a community more readily if you identify what those interests are. For example, Better Posters has a very tight focus: everything in the blog is related to conference posters in some way. I sometimes think the smartest thing I ever did in blogging was to split off my writing about conference posters and put it into its own blog. I could have written posts on my general blog and tagged the posts with “conference posters.” I do this with posts about oral presentations, which I do include on my general blog. Those posts are popular, and I get good feedback on them, but it is nowhere near the attention that the posters blog gets. You are much more likely to get attention if you can find a single, unoccupied niche and exploit it.

The focused subject helps build readership, for two reasons. First, a specialty “boutique shop” creates clarity of purpose. Audiences want to know what to expect. As we learned from the Blues Brothers movie, people who go to a country bar will start throwing their beer bottles if the band does not play country music. Focus means that readers know what they are getting if they read the blog, and they are not put off by topics they don’t like. With “everything plus the kitchen sink” blogs, there is a risk of putting people off if they come for the science but get a lot of posts about other topics in between.

Second, the tight focus makes it easy for people to recommend the blog. “If you want to learn about conference posters, this is the blog you need to visit” is a much more straightforward instruction for one reader to give another than “Go to this blog and search for the posts tagged ’posters.’ Or was it ’conference posters’? Or maybe ’poster design’?”

Having spent most of this chapter emphasizing community, social proof, and networking, why do I remain a ronin blogger?

First, I have enjoyed consistency. My blogs have never moved to new websites with new URLs. In the long term, this helps people to find my blogs. Thanks to people typing questions into search engines, some posts continue to attract traffic long after I posted them, and it is easier for people to find old posts by lucky searches because the link to those individual posts has never changed. My own home page provides a “portal” to my blogs, and allows people who find one of my projects to track back to find others.

Second, nobody can take down posts but me. Although blog networks often seem to give their writers considerable freedom, it’s not always clear how far the leash will stretch. Blogger Danielle Lee, for instance, once had a post from her blog, The Urban Scientist, temporarily removed by editorial staff on the Scientific American network.¹ The case attracted a lot of attention because it was extremely unusual. Still, it showed that blog networks, particularly those sponsored by legacy print media, might be heavy-handed in their efforts to protect their brands. Some bloggers have left networks and gone back to blogging on their own, in part because the desired support from the network leaders was not there. Serving a master means there is room for conflict, and may lead to a lingering fear that your superior might not always agree with you.

Finally, while there’s no denying that it’s nice to have an audience, I blog for myself first. I have a career that does not depend on blogging, so I have no need to chase page views. I do not need to run ads that offer “rules for a flat stomach” to subsidize my writing. I don’t need anyone to choose my writing or to pass an audition.

Despite the challenges of being a ronin blogger, then, there are many things I savor. I enjoy that my blogs have continuity, and that a reader can crawl through a blog in its entirety at one single web address. I’ve added new themes and threads to my blogs without worrying that I was stepping outside the boundaries of what that blog is “supposed” to be about. My blogging course is not buffeted this way or that by winds of chance. Because of why I blog, I choose to stay a ronin blogger.

Zen Faulkes is a neuroethologist at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He runs the blogs Neurodojo and the Better Posters blog. He is also author of the eBook Presentation Tips.

Zen is based in Edinburg, Texas. Find him at his website, http://doctorzen.net, or follow him on Twitter, @doctorzen.

Note

1. Danielle Lee, “Responding to No Name Life Science Blog Editor Who Called Me Out of My Name,” The Urban Scientist (blog), Scientific American, October 11, 2013, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/urban-scientist/2013/10/11/give-trouble-to-others-but-not-me.