Imagine a world where Discover, Nature Networks, Science 2.0, Scienceblogs, Discovery and all the others worked together. Yes, yes, I know we all do on occasion, but those times are based on personal relationships - we are all fans of people on various sites and link to them and support their work. But the groups are inherently competitors due to a finite audience size and, as the Scienceblogs Pepsigate events showed, advertising is a finite pool as well and corporations will go to various lengths to get more of it.
But the Pepsigate events did one other thing that, while perhaps resulting in a downward blip short term, may result in a much stronger Sciblings culture long term - by making a lot more Sciblings, and not just people who are on, or came from, a particular site. More on that below(1).
Can there be a collaboration culture across blogging networks? There can, it seems. I initially defended Adam Bly's choice to let Pepsi have a blog, for example, because the site had plenty of other institutional and corporate blogs, until I found out they were not being paid for their content but were rather paying - and some editorial influence had been exerted to protect advertisers(2). My thoughts changed completely when I understood the pain being felt by people who had been investing a lot of time for little money in something they believed in and felt like their credibility was being sold - but that would not have happened without getting a chance to read the many measured responses I saw, from people inside the issue and out.
But where was the rest of Science 2.0 while it happened? It was a non-issue here. The bigger story here was Tommaso's discussion of a 'light' Higgs that got blown out of proportion and the Scienceblogs advertising issue was lost - perhaps because our culture is more transparent. Writers get paid on pageviews and each month they click a button on their Dashboard and get money. Some months are good, some are bad. So it may be unimaginable why anyone would stay if there is no technical support, their input is ignored and they don't get paid.
But whether anyone else was or not, I have been thinking about the collaboration topic for a while, based on a beer conversation I had with social media guru Bora , once of Scienceblogs and now freelancing it (unless PZ gets him to come back) at the last AAAS meeting and our presence in the strange world we inhabit; not blogging, not Scientific American, not Facebook or Twitter, not a journal (3). Not anything that allows for easy description - and not the big name in any of those worlds, just big enough to be respected.
Then today on Twitter David Dobbs posted a link from the Knight Digital Media Center on this same topic, except in newsrooms, which are much more competitive than online science punditry. See? We all collaborate without even trying. Writer Michele McLellan discusses a Twitter event where one journalist addressed another and was cautioned about it - “public acknowledgement equals accreditation,” was the term. The big bosses did not want anyone to be collegial.
Obviously public acknowledgement is a terrific way to boost accreditation and it happened organically in blogging because journalism was basically in open warfare against bloggers; bloggers had a common enemy. But more and more, on all our sites, the bloggers are not grad students sticking it to The Man but are instead prominent book authors or researchers or journalists already.
So competitive should not be hostile, and her reason is practical - jobs are scarce and you don't want to need one and be hated by people at other companies. Culture still matters.
Michele likens it to those cartoons with the sheepdog and the Wile E. Coyote type, where they clobber each other all day yet, when the whistle blows, they grab their lunch pails and go home.
Apparently this subtle engagement is called 'social grooming' and I had never heard the term before but, you see, I got a little smarter because David Dobbs linked to something on Twitter and even though Scienceblogs is a competitor he is a great writer who posts interesting stuff so I pay attention. Therefore I got to read Michele, who I had never seen before and she had gotten some inspiration from Spot.us (and other nifty stuff before that) founder David Cohn, who I have known for years. But I didn't see it from him.
It was social grooming and I didn't know it.
As we grow Science 2.0 into version 3, we are going to be a lot more collaborative. The issue how we will do it while keeping our signal to noise ratio high. I want to see what everyone in science writing is doing in one place - that will take some work with other CEOs running media outlets because it isn't really collaboration if it just us promoting them.
NOTES:
(1) How do I mean the Sciblings family will get better? New networks will be created, some of the Scienceblogs people will go to Discover, some will come here - and they are making the family bigger by exporting the best parts of their culture into new places. So, in a way, the exodus may end up being a terrific thing for science writing overall.
(2) Funny somewhat related anecdote I hope he won't mind me relaying. When the wildly successful and much more popular Livescience folks came to us for a content trading relationship, I was thrilled, and when I announced it, Genomicron scribe Ryan Gregory wrote me and asked if he could still make fun of them. "They would expect no less from us," was my response.
(3) Think I am kidding about all of those things? I am not. The gist of nearly every aspect I listed above is contained here. We had Twitter features (we call it a Corkboard) before it blew up to be the big thing. Same with Facebook, chat, articles, etc. But it makes us darn hard to describe to people.
