Apologies from Neeley and myself for not keeping up-to-date with our blogging. I've been crazy busy, and Neeley just started a new job in a toxicology lab @ a research company! Congrats Bug!
So, as we all know, the increasing popularity of blogging in the last few years is astounding. The Future Buzz is a great website from 2009 showing various stats concerning different forums on the internet including Google, Wikipedia, blogging, YouTube and so on. The site states that over 346,000,000 people read blogs annually...seriously?! That's too many people to try to comprehend. When Neeley and I began our venture into science blogging - we were a little skeptical. That's not to say that we still aren't, but I suppose you could say we're slowly finding our footing in it. Initially, we both felt like...who really wants to read the rants of two 24 year old science nerds? We both have undergraduate degrees in Biology, we are both very intelligent when it comes to science (or we like to think so!), and are both currently working in the science field (myself in biochem, Neeley in toxicology) -- but searching through some of the science blogs that are out there, I came to find that so many of them are tremendously technical, detailed, and advanced. It was all a bit overwhelming.
We don't necessarily want to write about the most recent groundbreaking scientific research -- that's not saying it's not interesting to us nor to the rest of the general public -- but we'd rather write about topics we're interested in, already involved in, or just think are really really cool. Neeley wrote about the meat vs. vegetarian diet because that's something she's experimented with...and she loves food...amazing cook! And for me, I wrote about Darwin (because he's just spectacular) and about the ruminant research because I grew up on a farm and agriculture is something that I'm drawn towards.
Essentially, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Neeley and I are science geeks, through and through. It's an unhealthy passion. We have no idea how many people read what we write, or how many find it interesting. We can only hope that as time passes we will attract more readers into our ridiculous lives of science. It's become a forum for us to proudly display our geekdom. So, now that we have our pre-blogging jitters pushed aside, let's hope this roller coaster ride that we like to call our lives is interesting enough to people to make this blog successful!
Comic - courtesy of www.blaugh.com
I'm reading. Hey, you should add hyperlinks to your past posts when you reference them, so people can find them more easily.
ReplyDeleteI agree that you should write about what interests you and not worry about what you think you should be writing about. Have fun and people will enjoy your blog. But it doesn't hurt to leave comments on other blogs, and send out tweets about your posts, to attract some eyes.
I'll have to figure out how to do that -- not too sure how to reference past posts.
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