I feel equal parts curious, irritated, and bored by the dissolution of ScienceBlogs and creation of the new blogging collectives. Apart from Zuska and the occasional lateral click, I didn't read anything on ScienceBlogs that I hadn't already been following before the blog joined the collective.
The internet is a dynamic thing; I'm looking forward to innovation that might come from the change in the science blogosphere culture. On the other hand, the situation smacks of cliquishness that I find unbecoming.
12 comments:
GirlPostDoc had it right when she said the blogosphere is like High School. I've noticed that blogs which used to link to me, when I wrote more on grad school and feminist stuff have taken me off their blogrolls. I'm not sure I care.
Interesting to compare the recent blogosphere changes to flocculation. You add a little something, a things settle out.
I am having a hard time understanding why people think blogging collectives are the result of cliquishness. They are the result of people wanting to form a community, not a clique (there is a difference). The person(s) in charge of both of these blogging collectives were the ones to issue initial invitations, and it was their vision that set the initial tone and scope for these places.
I have joined Scientopia because the overall vision of the community appealed to me, not because I was best buds (or even buds at all) with the people starting the collective. I am also unfamiliar with the vast majority of my co-bloggers at that site. It is certainly not a clique to me. And I most certainly intend to continue reading and commenting on all of the non-community blogs that I have previously enjoyed!
@SM- Surely your taste in blogs has changed over time. So have mine, and so have those of people who may have had you blogrolled. This, coupled with the fact that blogs themselves often change over time (you yourself admit a change in what you write about)... are we forever committed to blogrolling the same people once they are on the blogroll? If so, then I don't want to blogroll anyone.
CEiA - I'm not sure GPD's reference was to the blogging collectives invites, I think its her opinion on the the whole blogosphere in general. As in there are bloggers who are part of the "cool" group. There is a reason everyone (including me) gets excited if DM or Zuska link to us. I'm not lying when I say I was over the moon to notice that I was on Zuska's blogroll.
In terms of the blogrolling, yes my tastes have changed over time, but I personally haven't stopped reading blogs that I first started reading BUT thats just me. Do I miss that certain bloggers who used to comment don't? of course, because my readers especially the regular commenters are friends to me. So of course i"m a little sad to see them go. Will I change because of it? Hell no!
In real life you have friends who you will drift apart from which can make you sad. You could say I've drifted away from some friends in bloggyland. I've noticed it and thought oh thats sad. Is there anything wrong with noticing it? I never said there was a problem with it.
So far Scitopia does not appeal to me. I've tried looking at their main page and just haven't seen any post titles that grabbed my attention at all. Maybe they just need better formatting?
Anyway I agree, it feels too group-y to me. I don't understand the need to band together in this case. Are they lonely? Do they just fundamentally not understand how the internet connects everyone together, no matter where they are?
The point Candid raises about blog taste evolving is an interesting one. I tend to view it more as people's blog content evolves, and it may or may not be more or less relevant to what I need to read. A lot of us were very earnest when we started, wrote Big Posts on Big Things and then realized we'd sort of covered a lot of ground and then what? My blog is a lot different now than it used to be, as are my readers. Which is fine by me!
"I am having a hard time understanding why people think blogging collectives are the result of cliquishness. They are the result of people wanting to form a community, not a clique (there is a difference)."
Yes, but CE, these communities tend to link within each other, very rarely to independent blogs, thus increasing their page views/traffic while the rest of us, who may also be saying some pretty important stuff (or may not, obviously) are not getting noticed. Communities bring increased traffic and keep people browsing within that space, and I certainly think that's nice. But I don't think that folks who blog within those communities are all that generous with spreading the love with their blogrolls or links or analyses of others' posts.
I remember that whenever Sb brought in a new Scibling, every single Sb blog I read would blog about it. They would link to each new blog. Even if what that person wrote about had absolutely nothing to do with what they normally post about, they would say, "Ooh, lookee! This looks super super interesting and you should give them a warm welcome because they are just so awesome!"
The other way in which the communities feel like a clique is all the secrecy before the launch. Of course we all knew the blogs who were like "Big news Monday!" were about to join a collective... and that if we weren't blogging about it, we hadn't been asked to be a part of it. How does that NOT feel like a clique?
@Kate, it makes sense to me the blogging communities would draw attention to a new blog on their network. It's *not* a clique, it is simply the equivalent of taking a cake over to your new neighbor's house to welcome him/her. I have always took it as such, and as a reader have gone ahead and NOT clicked on links to blogs I didn't think I'd find interesting.
As for what blogs are being linked to from blogging communities, cliquish linking has not been a problem with the (few) community blogs I frequent. I have always read DrugMonkey, and he has always provided quite a few links to Blogger and Wordpress blogs. You should be careful not to paint all blogs with the same brush.
It's worth noting that there is no internal secret code that we must link to each other to increase traffic. There is no conspiracy. What happens with community blogging is that people form a community- and a community is different than a clique! Yes, I have been reading the blogs of my new community members, and guess what- they write good stuff! I would not have known about this content if not part of the community. But are we all now BFFs? Not so much.
Not everyone put out teasers before launch. (I, being one of those who did not). Those who did put out teasers were doing so with the intention of creating excitement. Perhaps their mistake was assuming that blog readers would be interested in a new network with good content instead of feeling put-off.
Would you be saying the same things about network blogging if you'd been invited? From your comments, I'd assume that you all would have declined an invitation.
This is not high school, friends. This is just a group of bloggers trying to bring good scientific content to the internet masses. This is not at all intended to be a mechanism to make other bloggers feel left-out or unworthy.
I don't feel especially negative about the collectives, just sort of annoyed that there is so much focus on this shake-up. I really like FSP's recent post on the topic and mostly agreed with her. I too feel like I already am part of a blogging community, so I'm not sure I really see the need for collectives. Case in point, I have kind of lost interest in carnivals like Scientiaea. They were awesome at first when there weren't that many blogs and it was hard to find similarly-themed blogs, but now I've usually read all the posts before the carnival comes out because I already subscribe to most of the blogs.
IMO, one real negative is that some blogs change when they go big. For example, my beloved On Being a Scientist and a Woman definitely became a less intimate discussion when it moved to Scienceblogs. Ultimately that was unsustainable for that blog, but of course that might have happened anyway had it stayed on Blogspot. I also find that highly trafficked blogs get so many comments that I can't keep up with the discussion and drop out of it. That's obviously not the author's problem, but it is one reason I like smaller blogs.
But, other people clearly do think collectives are important, so I'm curious as to how it will all play out now with several new ones launching at once. My reading habits will probably not change much, as I will transfer my rss feeds and keep reading the same blogs in my feed reader.
Do you people not get how completely fucken ridiculous you look when you write entire blog posts about how "bored" and "indifferent" you are with the formation of new blogging collectives?
Perhaps "who moved my cheese, bitch?!" sums it up better?
Blogging collectives are an interesting phenomena - they come in many flavors but are found primarily in a few select domains: science, crafts, food, fashion - and some older ones for various Microsoft technologies. There is also usually an associated forum / community board.
I came across this post as I was adding it as a potential feed to the 'scientists' channel on Mattters. Mattters is search-engine like in that we post only snippets about each blog post - making the user click through to the actual blog in order to view the content [which is very different from collectives - where they display all the content and it is often very hard to find the original blog - I know, part of my job is trying to do just that].
Re Cliques: We often prefer the small blogger over the 'star blogger' - and not just because the star bloggers are often stars because they are mean, rude and nasty [yes, even scientists and mathematicians :-)].
We don't have a ton of 'Learning' channels yet, but we are working on it! The start of the Fall semester seemed like a good target date for us to have filled out the ontology a wee bit better.
A couple of weeks in and nothing's really changed for me, as a reader - except a few URLs. I'm still reading the blogs I was reading anyway, and I've added a few Scientopia and LabSpaces blogs to my "on trial" folder in Google Reader.
I think it's naive to say there is no cliquishness in the scientific blogosphere, and overly simplistic to say that each new network is a clique. I think there are cliques within (old and new) networks, just as there are cliques that span networks and cliques that contain only independent, non-networked bloggers. And of course the people setting up a new site are going to ask their closest blog buddies first... some of those buddies will be clique members, others not so much...
Shades of grey. Always.
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