Saving Science Blogs

Blogs tend to evaporate into the stratosphere of outdated software and broken links unless they are maintained and managed. Now, Jennifer Harbster, a staffer at the Library of Congress, wants to keep groundbreaking science blogs alive.

The Library of Congress began preserving websites in the year 2000. The library chooses which websites to preserve based on their historical value. This year, staff are accepting suggestions of which science blogs to save for future generations. Blogs which feature original research and ideas are the most likely to be selected, Harbster said.

The main goal of the Science Blogs Collection will be to capture a representative sample of science research, writing, teaching and communication, as well as scientific discourse in the United States.

Harbster said the main criteria for choosing a science blog to save are:

1. What is the usefulness of this information?
   
2. Will this blog supplement a preexisting collection?
3. Does this blog have research value?
4. Is the blog at risk?
5. Can the blog be easily captured?

If you want to suggest a science blog for preservation, visit the Library of Congress website and submit your idea.

Meanwhile, at ScienceBlogs, Frank Swain has suggested selling curated collections of blog posts as e-books. If this idea catches on, it could be another way to preserve the writing of science bloggers.

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Personal Branding: You Can’t Have the Whole Enchilada

As of today, I plan to rebrand this blog. Branding and marketing fascinate me partly because they are challenging. At the intersection of one’s enthusiasm, one’s skills, one’s circle of contacts, and the interests of one’s audiences lies a spot where one can sync with the market and create an impact. Finding this spot is like hitting a moving target. Which Facebook posts will generate responses? Which tweets will people pass on? What do readers find most captivating?

Like many people in my field, I want to learn about a variety of subjects. Over the years, my ideas have become more and more interdisciplinary, just like this image from Science Club for Girls shows. I began blending genres and mixing ideas in graduate school and have not stopped since then. Often, I find that the most exciting intersections happen where very different types of thought connect or collide.

What does this have to do with personal branding? Everything. When one attempts to create a brand for someone who has interdisciplinary interests, that effort is like taking the mixed cans of paint at the bottom of the photo and trying to make one of the cans monochromatic. And, in my experience, once I developed a taste for making mashups out of ideas, there was no route back. I couldn’t get back to that single-colored monotony again. It’s hard to reverse entropy.

But, at the same time, focus matters. One can’t have the whole enchilada. My current plans – both with this blog and with my Twitter account – are to focus on science communication at academic and nonprofit organizations. Since I have a web specialty, I will also be writing about online technology. I completed a web design certificate a few years ago and am planning to brush up my skills with the latest software.

This means I’ll write about how people communicate about science. And just in case you think that sounds abstract, my post about poetry in an auto shop does fit in with that theme. I can’t think of a better example of science communication in the community than a bunch of poets talking about the inner workings of cars. Same goes for my post about electronics recycling; the art in that post is a striking visual demonstration of what is inside our computers. I also plan to write about messaging, framing, and other communications topics.