Via sekrit, in the Journal of Science Communication, comes a deeply flawed article, Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions by Merja Mahrt and Cornelius Puschmann. The flaw, you'll be unsurprised to learn, is that it doesn't mention 'stoat'. I'm not sure that all the rest of it is too interesting either.
This paper presents results from three studies on science blogging, the use of blogs for science communication. A survey addresses the views and motives of science bloggers, a first content analysis examines material published in science blogging platforms, while a second content analysis looks at reader responses to controversial issues covered in science blogs. Bloggers determine to a considerable degree which communicative function their blog can realize and how accessible it will be to non-experts Frequently readers are interested in adding their views to a post, a form of involvement which is in turn welcomed by the majority of bloggers.
I was pointed at it, because it provides some insight into what I was told was the 'Connolley Question' but which one might call the Appell Question: what determines the numbers of comments on a blog or a blog posting? Its been clear to me for some time that the more tightly scientifically focussed my postings, the fewer comments I get. And indeed, that's not too hard to understand: if you discuss a problem in depth and provide the answer, there isn't a lot to speculate on in the comments. More open-ended posts get more comments. And you get most comments for threads that spiral out of control. A similar effect is visible across blogs. Or perhaps more fairly: many blogs seem to attract a regular readership, and these readers get used to talking to each other in the comments; and they seem to like having the same conversations again and again; you know what I'm talking about I'm sure.
So, from the study (very lightly paraphrased, because cut-n-paste from pdf is irritatingly broken):
Linguistic complexity is related to the amount of feedback a blog post receives from readers; the more demanding it is to understand a post, the less comments can be observed. By contrast, the number of comments is only moderately associated with the number of page impressions. On average, each of the 289 science-related blog post received 9.6 comments by readers, but these were found to be very unevenly distributed. Thirty-seven percent of the posts received no comments at all within a month after publication, another 33% received between one and five comments. At the other end of the spectrum, two posts received over 100 comments (more than 400 and 800, respectively). Both stem from the blog 'Respectful Insolence' (hosted on scienceblogs.com) and deal with controversies about the benefits and risks of vaccinations.Three more posts from this blog, two of which also discuss vaccination, received over 50 comments. This level of reader response was only achieved by three other posts, two from scienceblogs.com (one about media coverage of climate change and one originally about the role of the null hypothesis in research - Three more posts from this blog, two of which also discuss vaccination, received over 50 comments. This level of reader response was only achieved by three other posts, two from scienceblogs.com (one about media coverage of climate change and one originally about the role of the null hypothesis in research.
37% of blog posts getting no comments at all is eerily similar to a statistic I have in mind, that 50% of papers are never cited.
Irrelevant picture: the vertical-axis wind turbine of the Mullerhutte:
Entities 0 Name: Journal of Science Communication Count: 1 1 Name: Merja Mahrt Count: 1 2 Name: Cornelius Puschmann Count: 1 Related 0 Url: http://ift.tt/1rI1CvP Title: 10 Fresh Ways to Get Better Results From Your Blog Posts Description: Congratulations! You've published a blog post. After brainstorming a topic, doing a whole lot of research, writing a few drafts, adding a couple sweet images, picking a call-to-action, having a buddy edit it, and tightening up your title ... the hard work is all done, right? Right? Not so fast, my friend.
Post a Comment for "Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions - ScienceBlogs (blog)"