This comes as a total surprise and one of the coolest things to happen to me in professional aspect in a long while – I got nominated for a Blogger Recognition Award by TheNexusScienceBlog! Thanks a ton for the nomination and kudos for the great content!

[Here’s how this works:

• Thank the person who nominated you and provide a link to their blog.
• Attach the award to your post.
• Write a brief story / history of your blog.
• A take down of advice to new bloggers.
• Nominate 10 other bloggers.
• Comment on their blogs to notify them of the nomination.]

 

What’s behind my blog?

So, for those of you who have been on my blog already – you know I write about science, mostly biology. For the ones of you who stumble for the first time – I am scientist and I love science so much that apparently being in the lab all day wasn’t enough for me, I had to spend some of my free time writing about it too.

Writing about science appeals to me for many reasons – in the days when things in the lab didn’t work, I could read and learn about someone’s experiments which did work out so it is my “looking on the bright side of life” type of thing. Additionally, I often get very bothered by the spreading misinformation about scientific facts and the misuse of science in someone’s agenda, so I decided to start a blog where I could show the wide audience what’s up in the world of research by picking up interesting stories and retelling them to show that understanding science is not hard and you don’t need to spend 10 yrs in a university – you only need curiosity and a good story-teller. On top of that, for a while now, I was thinking and looking into a way to develop into a science communicator – the person who writes/talks about science, who brings the science days to your community or to your school; the person who makes sure you know what can science do for you and who reminds both you and the scientists that science is for everyone – not just for the people with degrees and/or money!

“How to” of science blogging?

In Europe there aren’t that many programs yet where they teach you how to be a science communicator and few courses exist where one is thought how to write science for normal people. A very resourceful colleague of mine suggested I start with a blog and learn “on the job” as I write for it. I already had at the time a poetry blog, so the idea of blogging was very dear to me and I jumped on it like a hungry lion. The name is based on an idea from my cousin – we are same age and she’s always been very supportive of my “sciencing”. And I started writing. On purpose on topics as far as possible from my own topic of research. I usually chose my topics completely randomly – I see an interesting press release, I go to the original paper and I try to understand and retell it; or I come across a scientific publication which reads interesting, I dig a lil more and write it up; I listen to many podcasts and watch pop-science TV shows and sometimes get inspired to learn more about a random fact I’ve heard there; or a friend says something interesting or asks me how/why something is the way it is – and I research it.

To put it simple – “inspiration is the others“! I just pay attention!

 

I’m not comfortable giving advise, as I myself still learn how to do it right, but you can read books on scientific blogging, writing and publishing; you can follow workshops, courses, online training, but if I can say one thing about it, it’d be that until you start writing, you will not learn. So start writing, publishing and see what works for you and for your target audience. In all fairness, I don’t have a target audience – I’d love for the most random people to read my blog – by accident or regularly, for me it’s important to give good science a wider scene along with the expensive subscriptions to magazines and heavy-matter publications only scientists read, even if with a miniscule attempt in one of the thousands sci-blogs out-there.

The hard part of this post

The tricky thing would be to name (only) 10 other blogs I find influential and outright interesting. So, I’m going to use a cheat and take my time to ponder on it, posting them in a separate post. 0:)

Stay tuned and thank you for all the reads!