A blog about condensed matter and nanoscale physics. Why should high energy and astro folks have all the fun?
Friday, February 02, 2018
Why science blogging still matters
Nature has a piece up about science blogging. It's pretty much on target. I'm a bit surprised that there wasn't more discussion of blogging vs. twitter vs. other social media platforms, or the interactions between blogs and formal journalism.
5 comments:
Anonymous
said...
"Blogging does have potential pitfalls. For a start, it is not likely to make anyone wealthy. 'It’s probably not worth doing it for the money unless your audience is huge,' says McGlynn. Small Pond Science, which has had more than 570,000 visits in total, doesn’t take ads. But even if it did, McGlynn has calculated, he’d probably clear only US$10,000 to $20,000 a year."
Must be nice to be able to leave that much $ on the table... I don't know how someone can refer to something that is 5-figures as "only"
Yeah, that struck me as weird in a couple of ways. I can see not wanting to annoy people with ads, and that is leaving money on the table by choice. I’m pretty sure that the Amazon ad on my blog (put there to advertise my book) has netted my about $30 over the last 2.5 years. I guess I’m missing out on something.
That struck me as weird in a couple more ways: the first number is a total while the second is a rate, and a typical number is more like $1 per 1000 *clicked ads*, not views.
I follow several science blog RSS feeds using Thunderbird, it's a really fast way to cover a lot of ground and read about new developments in any number of fields of interest. The other tool I love for doing this is the Flipboard app on my Android phone. If you can create a Flipboard channel I think you'd get a lot of readers.
5 comments:
"Blogging does have potential pitfalls. For a start, it is not likely to make anyone wealthy. 'It’s probably not worth doing it for the money unless your audience is huge,' says McGlynn. Small Pond Science, which has had more than 570,000 visits in total, doesn’t take ads. But even if it did, McGlynn has calculated, he’d probably clear only US$10,000 to $20,000 a year."
Must be nice to be able to leave that much $ on the table... I don't know how someone can refer to something that is 5-figures as "only"
Yeah, that struck me as weird in a couple of ways. I can see not wanting to annoy people with ads, and that is leaving money on the table by choice. I’m pretty sure that the Amazon ad on my blog (put there to advertise my book) has netted my about $30 over the last 2.5 years. I guess I’m missing out on something.
That struck me as weird in a couple more ways: the first number is a total while the second is a rate, and a typical number is more like $1 per 1000 *clicked ads*, not views.
Keep blogging Dr. Natelson!
Congrats for the mention of your blog in the Washington Post!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-sometimes-bizarre-world-of-condensed-matter-physics-is-interesting-really/2018/02/02/81883372-0601-11e8-94e8-e8b8600ade23_story.html
I follow several science blog RSS feeds using Thunderbird, it's a really fast way to cover a lot of ground and read about new developments in any number of fields of interest. The other tool I love for doing this is the Flipboard app on my Android phone. If you can create a Flipboard channel I think you'd get a lot of readers.
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