How to Blog

How to blog Ontogenesis: blogging a book Dr. Duncan Hull, Software engineer, EBI Chemoinformatics and Metabolism

What is a blog? Ontogenesis 05.02.10 A blog (a contraction of “ web log ”) is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse- chronological order . http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

c.f. Scientific Journal and Book publishing
Frequently / regularly updated – never “finished”?
Feeds: (a) Subscription and (b) Syndication
Post publication “peer - review”
Accessible statistics
Personal and/or Informal
Ontogenesis 05.02.10 Picture by Julian Cash http://www.flickr.com/photos/9494134@N05/752021495/

1. Regular / frequent updates
Most blogs are constantly updated
anything from many times per day to once every few months
Frequency / regularity determined by author(s) (not publishers)
Frequency can be very low e.g. Tim Berners-Lee http://dig.csail.mit.edu/breadcrumbs/blog/4
… Last updated 27 th March 2008 …
Ontogenesis 05.02.10

2. This works because of Feeds Ontogenesis 05.02.10
How many know what a feed is?
How many use a feed reader?
RSS ATOM Allows a) subscription and b) syndication

For example…http://knowledgeblog.org Ontogenesis 05.02.10 This site is available as a feed

e.g. In http://www.google.com/reader Ontogenesis 05.02.10 subscribe

2. (a) Subscribers are notified of updates Ontogenesis 05.02.10 Notification of update e.g. like email / subscribing to a Table of Contents of a journal

2. (b) Feeds also allow Syndication
Data can easily and automatically be re-used elsewhere
E.g. blogs.nature.com and researchblogging.org (hundreds / thousands of authors)

3. Peer-review (sort of)
Rather than being peer-reviewed before publication, blogs are typically peer-reviewed after publication (if at all)
This is done by
Comments
Linkbacks
Ontogenesis 05.02.10 Automatically inform author(s) when another site has linked to theirs

4. Accessible statistics
Most viewed (popularity)
Referrals (where web traffic is coming from)
Clicks (what links are being followed)
Search engine terms (what keywords used to find blog)

5. Personal / Informal Style
Many blogs are written from a personal point of view, like a diary or laboratory notebook
Informal, first person singular:
E.g. “ Fred Bloggs told me that x was a big load of … ”
Formal, third person, scientific style ”
E.g. “ Bloggs et al (2009) suggest that x is flawed …”

How to blog
We are using WordPress, which comes in two flavours:
Wordpress.com : Hosted e.g. http://rbaltman.wordpress.com/
Russ Altman, Stanford
Wordpress.org: Self–hosted e.g. http://blogs.bbsrc.ac.uk Douglas Kell, BBSRC

How to blog with wordpress
Either login to knowledgeblog.org
Write while logged in
save as draft
Or write chapters the usual way
login then cut-and paste

Once logged in you’ll see this Ontogenesis 05.02.10

Acknowledgements
Robert Stevens
Phil Lord
Christoph Steinbeck (EBI)

Happy blogging, any questions? Ontogenesis 05.02.10

How to Blog

by Duncan Hull on Feb 05, 2010

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How to Blog — Presentation Transcript