Today, I asked Anne Frances Johnson to answer a few questions. Anne is a freelancer and grad student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

When I was a kid, I, like all 8-year-old girls, wanted to be a marine biologist and ride around on dolphins. A couple decades later, I’m still into science and nature, but I don’t actually ride wild animals. I’m a freelance science writer and master’s student in the Medical & Science Journalism program at UNC. I like to think it’s as fun as riding dolphins, but probably better for the environment.

I’m originally from Raleigh, NC, and I’ve recently come full circle back to the Triangle after more than ten years away with stops in New Mexico, New England, New Zealand and Washington, DC (I lived there even though it doesn’t have “new” in its name). I have a B.A. in biology from Smith College, where I spent lots of time cutting open fish stomachs for my thesis on lobster predation (What Eats Lobsters besides People?).

I always liked learning about science, but in college I found actually doing it to be rather gooey and tedious, and decided I probably didn’t have the endurance for it as a career. I found myself gravitating instead toward the edges of science, where it interacts with society. I worked at a marine reserve in New Zealand, patrolled Costa Rican beaches for would-be sea-turtle-egg poachers, and tended persimmons, goats and alpacas on various farms here and abroad. But it wasn’t until my first “real” job–at the National Academy of Sciences–that I discovered science writing. Instantly smitten, I’ve been a ravenous science reader and writer ever since.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My first science communications piece was an educational booklet on stem cells. Most of the stem cell information available at the time followed either the science community’s party line (embryonic stem cells are more useful than adult stem cells so we should use them) or the conservative/political party line (scientists want to kill babies and we should stop them). Since I was working for a scientific organization, it would have been simple to take the usual tack, but we decided it was really time to go beyond that. I spent a lot of time talking to people ethically opposed to human embryonic stem cell research and tried to craft the booklet so it could reach those folks on their terms, while still being true to the science. Dealing with both the scientific and ethical issues head-on ultimately made it a more useful product for people, and tens of thousands of the booklets found their way into schools and doctors’ offices. It was very rewarding.

After that, I had the pleasure of developing a whole slew of other booklets (and posters and gadgets and websites) on topics including how to plant a pollinator-friendly garden, why microbes are cool and what the new science of “metagenomics” can tell us, and how climate change might affect ecosystems across the U.S. It’s been a constant learning experience.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Last year I decided to go back to school to pick up some additional communications skills I wasn’t sure I could learn on the job. So now I’m a science journalism grad student. Perhaps the most exciting aspect of the curriculum is the multimedia work I’m doing. I know “multimedia” is a silly buzzword, but it really is useful to be able to apply whatever combination of media–text, sound, video, graphics, animations–is right for the topic at hand. I’m enjoying learning to wield all those tools and figuring out how to leverage the strengths of each to communicate in an engaging way.

Although teamwork is incredibly powerful, it’s also useful to be able to function as a “one-woman-band,” with a complete suite of skills to produce everything from documentaries to press releases myself. Wherever I end up after I graduate in 2011, I hope I’ll be able to apply all my fun new skills and continue to learn and adapt to the changing communications landscape.

What’s up with going to journalism school? No offense, but isn’t that a dying industry?

I get that a lot. Journalism school is actually alive and well, even in the current climate. The journalism business model is in a period of adjustment that’s leaving a lot of traditional journalists out of work, and that’s too bad. But I think people are hungrier than ever for information, and for the most part they know the difference between bad information and good information. I think there will always be a role for good journalistic work–especially when it comes to science topics.

Career-wise, I’m more interested in communications than traditional journalism, but I think going through this experience of learning to write more like a journalist makes me a stronger communications person. I also just love being in journalism school because I’m surrounded by really creative thinkers from all different backgrounds, which challenges me to go beyond the obvious and try different approaches.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I love that there’s this vast array of genuinely interesting science content online that teachers can use as part of science education. Science education has had a terrible reputation for a long time. The Web gives teachers and parents opportunities to engage children in ways that have never existed before. Kids can interact with the scientific world on their terms and keep following the leads that interest them most. It sure beats those awful textbooks and cheesy videos I remember from childhood.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I have a healthy skepticism about using blogs and social networking in science communications. Organizations pour so much into getting their content out in all these different ways. They’re available and “free,” so why not? And sometimes they’re really effective at amplifying your reach and visibility. But they’re not magical. Sometimes, you’re better off simply producing more or better actual content, and your resources would be better spent focusing on the dissemination avenues that are most effective for your specific target audiences. There’s always a trade-off between quantity and quality, between producing new content and promoting your existing content. You have to hit the right balance, and I think blogs and social networking can be distracting if you don’t keep them in perspective. I try to use ‘em when they’re right for the task, and leave ‘em when they’re not.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

One of my favorite experiences was getting to hold these really old dead birds they keep in the bowels of the NC Museum of Natural Sciences. There were just racks and racks of them. We got to pass them around, and they were so astoundingly light and beautiful. It was fun to connect with nature in the way that taxonomists have for years and years, where you can take note of the tiniest differences among species. I loved that behind-the-scenes tour, and would be thrilled to be able do more of the tours next year.

On blogging, the conference perhaps counter-intuitively convinced me that it’s okay not to blog about science. Seeing all those people blogging and tweeting so passionately, I thought, you know, there’s room for all types here. And if daily blogging isn’t my thing, it’s okay. People are blogging about science, and people are writing involved, long-form articles and books about science, and folks will continue to be engaged with science on whatever basis is useful for them–whether it’s monthly, daily or by the second. There are so many possibilities, so many ways for people to talk about science. With all those opportunities, you can really shop around and focus on what you can do best.

Thank you so much for the interview. I hope you will come to the meeting again next January.

Today, I asked Cassie Rodenberg to answer a few questions:

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m a Charleston, SC native that now resides in NYC — a complete Northern convert that carries an appreciation for Southern plantations and shrimp ‘n grits. As a kid I slogged through marshes to erect an osprey perch, played slippery ‘jelly ball’ (jellyfish) hockey on a shrimp boat and floated an ATV across a river, only now realizing how much science I was experiencing. The physics of ATV floating? The surprising number of jelly balls hoisted aboard a boat when hunting for shrimp? The torturous plotting of perch placement in attracting birds of prey? Science is everywhere, why hadn’t I noticed?

I’m shamelessly effervescent about science now, dying to share a cool science factoid or an interesting study, which somehow bubble out despite my best efforts to stem them! I think people care about science more than we think they do; science communicators just need to find out what intrigues them– like ATVs or jellyfish hockey games. Enthusiasm and passion are contagious, too. If we’re truly excited, others will be as well. We all need to find the inner kid that’s fascinated by the world around us, the one that shouts, “oo, cool!” before trying to reach the public.

I studied chemistry during college, finding it the most beautifully simple and elegant of all the sciences. Under an NIH grant, I conducted inorganic chemistry research — single molecule spectroscopy — on the Amyloid-Beta peptide associated with Alzheimer’s, looking at different conditions that stimulate growth of the earliest cytotoxic stages of peptide and thus spur the disease’s formation. And my 11-year-old brother would be horrified if I didn’t mention the coolest part: I worked with a laser in the dark.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Gosh, it certainly is an interesting trajectory…after my lab days I wanted to investigate the public’s perception of science, how people thought about science on a daily basis. Actually, I was so intrigued, I later published psychology research on the subject. If we’re making careers out of reaching people and teaching, we better understand where these people come from and how they think.

And so, I worked at a local science museum, teaching science in big public programs — chemistry demonstrations, reptile shows (yes, I held everything from boas to Madagascar hissing roaches to tarantulas)… even walked around in a toga as the Lady of Pompeii to guide in ancient medicinal practices. Besides learning fascinating things myself (iguanas have a third light-sensing eye on the tops of their heads, my long curly hair could stand on end with enough static electricity power..), I learned quickly how to speak across age barriers, from the three-year-old to her great-grandmother to her bored aunt with a Blackberry.

After, I moved to NYC and took science journalism graduate courses at NYU before becoming an in-house contributor at Popular Mechanics and a writer for the weekly science section of the Charlotte Observer.

Now I’m starting at Discovery as an associate web producer, working mainly with planetgreen.com, a environmental and futuristic tech initiative.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

The geek side of me loves production and organization. Though I like writing, I don’t feel married to my byline — the important thing to me is contributing to something meaningful. I hope to do more entrepreneurial work with both science- and non-science-based efforts, hopefully working with idea geniuses to launch new projects. Of course, I’d expect that whatever I delve in will have some scientific element to it, but hybridizing science with other subjects makes it more tangible to readers. We should always be reaching and trying new things… I could never imagine myself without a side project bubbling in the recesses of my mind.

You used to be involved with Scienceline until recently. Can you tell us a little bit more about the project, what was your role there, and what were your experiences while working there? Was it a useful jumping board for your career?

Scienceline is a project of NYU’s graduate science journalism program — all students contributed to running the website and producing content, a mini-newsroom of sorts. It’s a bit like training wheels on a bike: it’s important to get newsroom experience, even working with fellow students as editors, before getting started in the real world of journalism. Though I think it is useful to an extent, especially for giving prospective employers links to clips, I encourage all students to go for internships first and foremost. I’ve always learned most by jumping headlong into a field.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

The web provides science communicators a wonderful opportunity for collaboration. Once upon a time, in a small town in South Carolina, I didn’t know any science writers, didn’t know who to go to for advice and inspiration. The web has transformed this, and that struggle isn’t true anymore, as we have genius at our fingertips at just a tweet away. We can craft ideas, bounce them off one another and form relationships. Even further, we can debunk bad science, pass along source recommendations and generate excitement on an issue.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I started out blogging but lost steam fairly quickly, realizing that Twitter was a much better outlet for my exuberance that a blog post because, honestly, I want to talk about science news constantly… but don’t usually have time to blog about it. On Twitter, I can post the gist of my opinion and ask others for theirs in return — much more effective and efficient than waiting around for comments on WordPress. I can feel the hum of my network around my tweets, much more vibrant than a blog. Twitter is inordinately positive in what I do — knowing what the public thinks should be as, if not more so, important to a journalist as writing a piece, and Twitter magnifies the vitality of readers.

Just after ScienceOnline2010, I highlighted an online event in which you played a central role, that hints at how some aspects of the new journalistic ecosystem – scientist-journalist collaboration – may work. What are your thoughts, in light of this event, on the ways the science journalistic ecosystem is changing?

I think scientists and journalists are finally understanding how much they need one another to effectively change the way science news is disseminated. Science journalism should never have been a fragmented system, it should be a constant conversation and relationship between two different sorts of people united by a single goal. Honest and important news comes from general concern and idea generation — the best ideas come from different vantage points. In the future, I imagine scientists and journalists brainstorming and mingling over drinks, public interest forefront. I’ve already mingled on Twitter — the web only enhances the science/journalist cocktail hour.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

It staggered me to think beyond web and print communication and on towards TV, entertainment and citizen journalism projects. It’s invigorating to realize what an effort there is to mesh good science with the public realm and gives me hope that scientific accuracy may not be so far away, that scientists won’t always be portrayed in movies as ‘mad’ and that everyone can do small science projects at home for the benefit of a larger goal.

It was so nice to meet you in person and thank you for the interview. Looking forward to meeting you again soon in NYC and I hope to see you here again next January.

Today, I asked Fenella Saunders from The American Scientist to answer a few questions:

Welcome to Science In The Triangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I was born in England, raised in New York City, did my undergraduate at Duke University in North Carolina, went back to New York for 10 years, then came back to NC five years ago. I have a master’s degree in animal behavior from Hunter College of the City University of New York, where I did my thesis on the interactions of proboscis monkeys in captivity. My undergraduate degree is in computer science with a minor in Japanese, although I chose my major with the concept of going into science journalism.

While I was at college I discussed the education I would need with a number of science journalists, all of whom told me that an education in science, with outside projects to get journalism experience, was the best way to go. (I am from the era just before when it became pretty much standard for science writers to go to an MA program for science journalism.) A computer science major allowed me to study a broad range of sciences and technology, and it also gave me a backup plan in case journalism didn’t work out. At school I wrote for any venue I could get into (and I was lucky that in addition to a regular school paper with a health/medicine section, Duke had both a student-run science and a technology magazine), and in my senior year I wrote a couple of small pieces freelance for Popular Mechanics.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My career started when I landed an internship at Discover Magazine, then got hired on. It was largely a matter of luck and timing: They had a lot of biology people and needed someone with a technology background. I stayed at Discover for about eight years, and ended up also being the online editor toward the end of that time. There were a ton of great moments at that job, but I would have to say my favorite one was when they allowed me to start writing about a different, new robot in each month’s news section. It was a series that lasted 2-3 years, and I never ran out of new robotics research to write about. During that time I freelanced a little, most notably as a co-author for a Time-Life book called “Space 2100.” I left Discover to work on publications for NYU School of Medicine for about two years, which was a very different experience. Probably the best part of that job was learning all about really high-powered MRI machines. For the past five years I’ve been at American Scientist, where I am now a senior editor. It is both fascinating and a challenge working with different scientists each issue, trying to get them to explain their own work for a general audience. I couldn’t even begin to pick a favorite from all of the articles I’ve helped bring to print–it could be anything from Champagne bubbles to snow flakes to honeybee nest relocation.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

American Scientist is published every two months, so we always confront the problem of remaining timely. We want to find more ways to keep in contact with our readers between issues. We recently relaunched our Web site, which allowed us to better keep up with technology in a few ways. We’re now able to embed video with the online versions of articles. We now also post podcasts of our lunch-speaker series. I am excited that I have been chosen as a fellow to attend on of the Knight Digital Media Center’s multimedia workshops, where I’ll learn more about how to edit audio, video and maybe program some Flash animation. I am hoping that after I attend that workshop, I will be better equipped to have us do more multimedia for the magazine online.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

The immediacy of the Web still is its biggest advantage in my mind. Something can be posted for all of the world to see within minutes, and if you are looking for information on a specific topic, a quick search will pull up enough reading to last hours. It’s a very democratic platform, as anyone can post on it, but that makes it all the more important to make sure that sources are reputable and verifiable–I am pretty sure that we all rely too much on the truthfulness of Wikipedia these days. I am also hopeful that the Web can make information, about science or anything, more accessible to people who, say, don’t have the luxury of going to college, or find themselves in a position of having to learn about something new that they never thought about doing.

That being said, I am still unsure of how the print vs. online debate is going to shake out. There is something to be said for picking up a whole magazine, not just a specific article you were looking for. It is broadening to be exposed to topics you might not have even realized existed. People are busy, so in some ways it’s faster just to pick up a print copy rather than have to search and dig online. Perhaps platforms such as the iPad will change all this. But I know that, when I have the time, just browsing through publications in the library is the best way for me to get new ideas.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

It’s fairly bizarre for a publication not to use all social-media platforms possible these days. We send out a daily and a weekly conglomeration of science news, and we tweet about these entries daily as well. We also use twitter to talk about what’s in our latest issue, and we tweet about any news that relates to a past story that we have done. We have groups on Facebook and LinkedIn. We don’t have a set blog yet, although we are working on it, but our Computing Science columnist, Brian Hayes, has a regular one at bit-player.org.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

Carl Zimmer is a former colleague of mine at Discover magazine, and he was an early entry into the blogosphere, so his was probably the first blog that I followed. I was happy to meet Ed Yong at the conference, and I follow his blog “Not Exactly Rocket Science.” I’ve also been following Rebecca Skloot’s blog about her book “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.”

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I really liked the fact that there were kids at the conference. Kids often are not brought into the dialogue when discussing science, particularly science journalism. Sometimes they are the target audience, but they are rarely part of the process. For a few years we did a mentoring program with a local middle school where we’d have kids come in for a week, but they’d rotate, so I’d get each student for only one day. I challenged them that they would write a whole science news story by the end of the day, and they all looked at me like I was crazy, but they all did it. Children can do amazing things if given the opportunity, and can provide unique insight. I found it particularly enlightening that the young students at ScienceOnline 2010 thought that Twitter was an adult thing–they saw no real use for it in their lives, preferring more interactive platforms such as Facebook.

I can’t say my usual “It was so nice to meet you in person” because I see you often, but certainly thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.

Today, I asked Karyn Hede to answer a few questions:

Welcome to ScienceInTheTriangle. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I think of myself as a scientist who writes, even though I jumped out of research after graduate school. Most of my formal education is in science. I was biology/chemistry major and then studied genetics in graduate school at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. I should have known I would end up a science communicator though. As an undergraduate, I performed in a “chemistry magic show.” We would go around to elementary and middle schools and get kids involved in the show. It was fantastic to see kids get engaged and to realize that science can be fun. After I committed to making the switch to writing about science and medicine, I studied journalism at UNC-CH. This was well before the medical journalism program existed. I was the oddball. I like to think I helped plant the seed for that program. I’ve spent my whole career telling stories about medicine, science and scientists.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My first professional writing gig was for a local publication called Triangle Business Journal. I talked the editor into letting me write personality profiles of local scientists. My first interview was with George Hitchings, of the [now defunct] Burroughs Wellcome Co., who had just won the Nobel Prize in Medicine. He was so gracious, and I was so nervous! Many years later, I was working as communications officer at the Burroughs Wellcome Fund, a post now occupied by the inestimable Russ Campbell, when Dr. Hitchings passed away. We went over to the old Burroughs Wellcome offices to collect some of his memorabilia for display. They had his personal scrapbook there – he had cut out the article I wrote and put it in his scrapbook. That remains one of the best compliments I’ve ever been paid as a writer.

I was senior science writer at Duke Medical Center for four years. I learned how to put together broadcast-quality video and how to organize and run a news conference. It was a hectic job, and I spent a lot of my time responding to media requests. I discovered I prefer to be on the other side of the equation. I like to be the one asking questions.

Currently, I am a news correspondent for Journal of the National Cancer Institute and for the journal Science’s Careers site. I also write for magazines and science organizations.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?

An undercurrent within my work has always been career development for scientists. When I was a graduate student, you were pretty much on your own as far as exploring career options and developing professional skills. I enjoy teaching and helping support the next generation of scientists. In the last couple of years I have done some consulting work with the North Carolina Biotechnology Center to promote professional science masters programs with the state. We organized a meeting around the issue in 2008. I’ve also been working with Russ Campbell on a series of professional development booklets for scientists. Recently, I started teaching scientific writing for biomedical graduate students at UNC. I taught two courses, one for first-year students and a second course I developed for students who are working their first grant or their dissertation. It’s my way of giving back.

What are your goals?

I am also into gardening and the local food movement. I subscribe to a local CSA at Maple Spring Gardens. A few years ago I organized a session at the National Association of Science Writers meeting to get science writers more interested in covering how our food is produced. Since then, the topic has gotten a lot of coverage, with Michael Pollan’s fantastic books and all the concern over outbreaks of food-borne disease. I’d love to write more about the intersection of science and food production.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I think the wave of the future in science communication is going to be scientists engaging directly with people through their own blogs, videos and websites. Some people (like you!) are naturals and don’t need any help. I know scientists who would like to move more into this arena, but don’t know how to get started. I’d like to work with scientists to help them develop those communication and storytelling skills.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I read blogs and have gotten story ideas from blogs. I don’t have a blog (yet). I like to let ideas percolate for awhile before writing. The thought of having to produce coherent posts every day (or nearly so) is a bit daunting. My Facebook connections are mostly old friends from college and family. I like LinkedIn for work-related networking – it’s a bit more professional and I like having more control over the content.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I lived in Washington state for several years and moved back to North Carolina a couple of years ago. In my absence, I discovered an enthusiastic on-line science blogging community had grown up here. I wasn’t surprised. This has always been a science-rich area – blogging is just the latest incarnation of the local science communications community, but with a much wider reach now. I read your blog, Drugmonkey, Female Science Professor, The Intersection, and Terra Sigillata, among others.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year?

This was my first time attending ScienceOnline. I was impressed with the sessions and particularly the workshops on Fri. The sessions on visualization in science were valuable, because I was teaching at the time and was able to gather a lot of incredible resources for my students. Meeting so many interesting people who are inventing the future of science communication was great. I’d love to see more of a mashup of working scientists and science communicators shaping the agenda next year.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope you can come again next January.

Today, I asked Tom Linden from the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

My passion always has revolved around journalism. When as a scrawny 13-year-old, I failed to make the starting nine on my JV high school baseball team, I was devastated. Rather than wait for my body to catch up to my aspirations, I jumped into journalism, eventually becoming my high school newspaper’s sports editor and editor-in-chief. I loved words and stories and so continued on my writing path through college where I was a columnist and editor for the Yale Daily News. As a senior at Yale, I covered for the Los Angeles Times the pretrial hearings of several Black Panthers accused of murder in New Haven, Conn. After graduation I worked on the city desk of the Times.

After taking a year off to do research for a book (that never materialized), I suffered a case of writer’s block and decided to pursue a career that would give me tools to travel around the world and practice a new craft… medicine. Within weeks of registering for med school, I realized that the journalism bug never left me. I completed med school and a residency in adult and child psychiatry at the Menninger Foundation, then in Topeka, Kans., and started a private practice in which I subsidized what I would call my “journalism addiction.” I worked at a small local television station in the northern Sacramento Valley where I became the health reporter and eventually the 5 o’clock news anchor. In 1989 CNBC hired me to join their start-up cable news venture as both a medical and environmental reporter and a financial news anchor. For the next eight years I worked for a variety of television stations and networks, including the Financial News Network, KRON-TV (San Francisco), Fox-11 (Los Angeles) and Lifetime Medical Television. I also started anchoring Journal Watch Audio, produced by the Audio-Digest Foundation and the Massachusetts Medical Society. In 1995 I co-authored one of the first books on the medical Internet, Dr. Tom Linden’s Guide to Online Medicine. In 1997 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill hired me to start a medical journalism program in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

As part of our program in medical and science journalism, my students and I have produced a couple documentaries with an environmental focus and more than 25 feature stories for North Carolina Public Television. I also just authored a book, The New York Times Reader: Health and Medicine, published by CQ Press. The book is both a compendium of great stories from The Times and a how-to manual for aspiring medical and health writers.

For the future I’m interested in producing a sequel to our Environmental Heroes documentary and continuing to help educate medical and science journalists.

Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself?

I grow most of my own vegetables and fruit from May through November. I’ve just planted seven fig trees that I cloned over the winter and have more starter tomatoes, peppers and eggplants than I know what to do with. I voraciously follow the news and love walking in the forests of North Carolina. My family loves to travel, but travel and maintaining a major garden (small farm) don’t always mesh. I also love to hear good music. In North Carolina there’s lots of it.

Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)?

I was born in California and have lived on both coasts and on the Plains (Kansas) which is very oceanic if you live in the countryside. If I had unlimited resources, I would live by the sea. Philosophically, I am a skeptic and question just about everything.

What is your (scientific) background?

As I said above, I went to medical school and took the usual courses. Science used to intimidate me, but does no longer. I’ve learned more about medicine by reporting on it, than I did in the hours and days that I spent studying it.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days?

Writing The New York Times Reader: Health & Medicine took most of my free time over the last year and a half. Now that the book has been published, I’m looking for a new project. I keep getting drawn to environmental issues since climate change and the destruction of the earth’s natural habitats loom as the biggest issues facing humankind. The challenge is to find stories that inspire action and not just induce fear.

What are your goals?

I’d like to see young people (i.e., everyone under the age of 30) do a better job of taking care of the planet than their parents and grandparents. I’d like to help them do that in any way that I can.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

Clearly the Web is the pipeline through which knowledge will travel over the next couple decades. I’m looking for ways to reach non-scientists with information that will both engage and inform them. As a television journalist, I see video as probably the most powerful tool to reach masses of people. The challenge is to how tell video stories in ways that both entertain and educate.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I have a blog, “Dr. Tom Linden’s Health Blog“, but am still trying to figure out what my blog voice is. I’ve taken a little hiatus in updating the blog during the course of writing my latest book, but hope to post more often in the days ahead. In tweeting a lot at a recent conference of the Assn. of Health Care Journalists, I got an appreciation for how much fun tweeting is.

Online activity is both a joy and a burden. I love staying connected with what’s happening around the world, but find it hard to control the beast. If you’re a journalist, you need to be comfortable with the entire toolkit.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

David Kroll (Abel Pharmboy) and Anton Zuiker were my first science blogging mentors. I’m a fickle blogging reader and will follow a link at anything that piques my interest.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I love the networking that goes on at ScienceOnline. After each session I pore over the Web reading about the people I’ve just met. I liked Ivan Oransky’s suggestion in a previous Q&A about having full disclosure for all speakers and panel members at future conferences. Also, it would be nice to get back to the un-conference mode of the first few ScienceOnline meetings. Keep up the great work, Bora, David, Anton and everyone else who brings us this ScienceOnline gift every year.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.

Today, I asked Tyler Dukes to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m a journalist working as a Web producer for News 14 Carolina in Raleigh, N.C., and I do freelance science writing on the side. I grew up mostly in eastern North Carolina, not too far from the Outer Banks, and I’ve lived in the South my entire life. I wanted to be an engineer when I left for N.C. State University. But that changed after 2-and-a-half years of class, a rapidly declining GPA and an increased leadership role at the student newspaper.

Looking back now, I think I bristled at specialization. I loved understanding the basics of complicated science and technical topics, but when I dove deeper I thought about all the other neat science I was missing out on. That curiosity is a skill in journalism, especially science journalism; but in engineering, it’s a distraction.

In short, I’m a southern science storyteller, which means I wax poetic about the chemistry of barbecue while I’m out cooking a pig for a football tailgate.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

When I came back for a victory lap (read: fifth year) at N.C. State after four years and a stint as editor-in-chief of the student newspaper, I got the gig as Science & Tech editor there. That meant a whole year of chasing stories about campus research and science issues affecting the community. I covered the phenomenon of disappearing bees, interviewed the chair of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and sprinkled in some in-depth general news stories along the way.

In the months while I languished between graduation and full-time employment, I discovered blogging and podcasting. I even created a short-lived series on beer in the Triangle (another one of my passions). In late 2009, I revamped my personal blog, Write -30-, which is all about the changes in the journalism industry.

I’ve also spent the last two years at News 14 trying to figure out how to use social media to make the journalism at the station better. I’ve learned a lot, but as a side effect I’ve met a crazy amount of awesome people. It’s actually how I first learned about ScienceOnline.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Right now, I’m doing more freelance science writing in my free time, which is even more fun than I figured it would be. I’m also periodically blogging about whatever journalism topics that happen to interest me at any given moment.

At some distant point in my career, I’d love to be a staff writer for a science and technology magazine. But the future of journalism is really hard to foresee right now, so I’m a bit unsure about what jobs will exist in 10 years and which ones I’ll be qualified for. Regardless of the medium, I’ll be happy enough to continue my vain attempts to satisfy my insatiable curiousity.

I’m also planning my wedding in June, which is way less fun than I figured it would be. But my soon-to-be wife is awesome, so it’s definitely worth it.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I love how science communication requires you to think like both a scientist and a writer (at least if you do it right). I spent a long time in college rewiring my brain to understand Java, electron physics and differential equations, so I feel like I’d be doing my student loans a disservice if I didn’t put that partially rewired brain to good use.

When it comes to the Web, I love the chaos it creates. News organizations, for the most part, have taken their credibility for granted. Reporters and editors assume, right or wrong, that it’s the newspaper masthead and the history behind it that gives them that credibility. They’ve seldom been challenged or forced to prove why anyone should trust them, and the result is a rapid decline in their audience’s confidence.

Bloggers, on the other hand, are forced to prove to their readers why they should be trusted. It’s not enough to have a Web site. They have to build their audience and their credibility over time, and the result of that process tends to be a more quality product in a lot of ways.

This is a really valuable exercise for science journalists and reporters in general, and we’re seeing it reflected even with more traditional reporters. That’s why there’s more and more emphasis on reporters working to build their “personal brand,” independent of a newspaper or television station.

The Web has made credibility more personal, and that’s a good thing for everybody.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

When I first started at News 14 Carolina, our social media presence was nonexistant. We had a few blogs here and there, but there was no unifying strategy or plan to embrace these technologies. We started small, with a few Twitter accounts and a Facebook Page where we really worked to engage our audience in actual conversation. What we really wanted to do is show the news directors and our general manager that these were valuable uses of our time that needed to be integrated into the station’s workflow. The case we made, with both research on how people use social media and actual data from our own social media brand, was that we needed to bring our content where people are on the Web.

After about a year, the impact was really clear. Facebook grew from one of our top-20 referring sites to our No. 1 referring site. That’s higher than Yahoo and Google. Now that we’ve made our case, a lot more of the newsroom has started to come on board. More people are signing up for Twitter and creating fan pages on Facebook with the intention of connecting with viewers. They don’t see it as extra work, but as a way to make their work more valuable. That’s very rewarding to me.

Personally, I’ve found my blog, Twitter and Facebook to be invaluable tools for reaching out and connecting with more people in journalism and science. These are people I might never come into contact face to face, and I’ve really been amazed by how accessible this technology makes everyone.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

Most of the science blogs I read before ScienceOnline were the offshoots of more traditional news publications. Short Sharp Science on New Scientist and Wired Science were some of my favorites. I’ve also followed technology blogs, like TechCrunch, Engadget and Gizmodo, for a while.

Many of my favorite blogs now I discovered after meeting the bloggers at ScienceOnline. Your own Blog Around the Clock, Deep Sea News, Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science and Ben Young Landis’ blog are all in my Google Reader now.

Oddly enough, I came across Deep Sea News back in June 2009 when I was researching a story I did on the Cameron Village sewer monster. They had a story (and identification) on the creepy lifeform before any traditional media outlets. Now I’m a pretty frequent reader.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I’m a big fan of journalism conferences. There’s nothing like getting out of the newsroom for a few days to rub elbows with some great reporters and editors and draw inspiration from their advice and work.

But the thing I loved about ScienceOnline was that it pulled together three very different groups — scientists, science communicators and science journalists — for some very frank (and often contentious) conversations about a shared goal: how to use the Web to increase the public’s understanding of science. Through Twitter, blogs and Facebook, those conversations started before the conference even began. By the time we all showed up, people were familiar with each other’s work, which helped the discussion flow more freely. That conversation continues today, and I can honestly say I got more out of ScienceOnline than any conference I’ve ever attended.

It was so nice to see you and thank you for the interview. I hope to see you again soon.

Today, I asked Scott Huler to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

My scientific background is all writing; that is, I’m a writer who has always loved science and scientists, but I never practiced advanced science. I’ve been all about getting the word out from the start. All through school I took every science course I could — geology, astronomy, biology, calculus, physics, chemistry — because I loved the power of science and scientific thinking and understanding, but I never doubted I’d major, as I did, in literature. Writing was what I wanted to do.

Now I live in Raleigh, NC, surrounded by interesting science and interesting scientists and never lack for subject matter. I’ve written about — and write about — lots of things, not just science, but even that generalism is a sort of scientific philosophy. The natural philosophers of the 17th and 18th century were in many ways the first true scientists, but they didn’t think of themselves as such — they thought of themselves as people who wanted to know the whys and hows of their world, and they didn’t limit themselves to certain processes or issues. In my work, and my life, I aspire to be like them.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’ve always wanted to write, so out of college I’ve just sort of made my way towards writing work of one sort or another. That’s let to electronic media as well, doing radio work for NPR and its affiliates and video work on websites and other places. Since I’ve done every newsroom job from copy editor to managing editor and told stories in books, on the radio, and on video, I like to think I can let the story come to me and tell me how it wants to express itself: sound? images? words on paper? When you’re a hammer, everything is a nail. I like to try to be more like a tool belt.

I’ve been incredibly fortunate with projects. I’ll list a few projects during which for at least at one moment I thought, “If this is as good as it gets, if this is the best assignment I ever have, I cannot complain.”

– in 1995 as a member of the staff of the News & Observer in Raleigh I joined with staffers of four other papers up and down the East Coast and joined with them to complete a sort of relay through hike of the Appalachian Trail. The N&O was an early adopter of the web, so there was a lot of traffic on the website for that (examples: Going The Distance On A Smokies Trail and Our adventure ends)

– in 1997-98 I spent much of my free time hanging around the garage following a top-level NASCAR race team, trying to understand how the physics lesson of making a car go fast. That too led to a book, but here’s a cool story I did for the Times about what happens when it all goes wrong.

– in 2002-3 I finished two decades of the most desultory research by spending a year on a Knight-Wallace Fellowship at the University of Michigan getting to the bottom of the Beaufort Scale of wind force. No, I am not kidding, the Beaufort Scale of wind force. It’s a smashing, poetic, highly observational, descriptive scale of the wind. Long story, but it turned into a book, and the weeks I spent sketching the coast of Montevideo, Uruguay, from the bridge of a hydrofoil or hoisting sail on the barque “Europa” were lifetime reporting highlights.

– in 2004 I skipped out on much of the pregnancy of my first child to spend months tracing the journey of Odysseus from Troy, in Turkey, to Ithaca in Greece, decidedly by the scenic route. I hope the book was good, but I was just glad to be out there.

– in 2008-9 I spent most of my time going to water plants and sewage plants, scrabbling around in storm drains and substations, trying to make sense of all the infrastructure that serves my house and everybody’s house. It was like having my entire work life be the best sixth-grade field trip of your life, for two years. The book is just out.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Amazingly, for the first time ever, I haven’t just walked away from the topic I’ve finished a book on. There seems to be so much more to talk about in the systems I’ve spent the last years learning about that I’m not quite ready to be done. To that end I’ve spent the last month doing a video project for the city of Raleigh about its brand-new water plant opening May 12 and hoping to do more of the same. That said, I am and will remain a generalist — you never know what the next project will be.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I’m fascinated by the history of science in our daily lives, whether it’s finding out through the Beaufort Scale that the wind was oil back in the day, powering our entire commerce structure, or that Herodotus and Pliny pointed to aqueducts and sewers as the glory of Greece and Rome, not to the Parthenon Pantheon, the Agora or the Forum. Science is foundational, and I guess in days like these it’s almost thrilling to fight those who believe that when you turn a key and your car starts making noise 100 times out of a hundred or you punch in numbers and a bell rings in your friend’s house a continent away then science is good, but when the exact same process of thinking leads you to conclusions that challenge your beliefs science is bad. That in itself is fundamentally unscientific thinking, and it’s shocking to live in a time when it’s in its ascendance, but at least you don’t have to look hard to find the bad guys.

As a researcher and reporter I both love and hate the web. I love how easy it is to find people who know about something I’m trying to learn about, but I hate it too. Instead of a few local sources, or a few gatekeepers who can lead me where I need to go, I’m faced with a panoply of sources, each of whom has strategically keyworded his or her resume or home page to maximize contacts and so only might actually know about the topic I think he or she should. In some ways things like Google books can let me view, in my home, an amazing source like this one, which I ran across in my research on the Beaufort Scale, but in some ways I preferred it when getting off your butt and getting out in the world was job one of a reporter. Like all technology, you still have to manage it and master it, not the other way around.

But the scientific community makes such a great job of working to get information out by using the web that overall it’s just a treat to have that resource. Though hard to find time to do anything else once you click into it.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

I think I’ve answered that above, in a way. I love the links I get from scientific friends on Twitter, but if I did nothing but check into and respond to those links that would be my entire day. And almost every link is worth following — that’s the problem. And I do need to do more responding — I need to be a more active part of that community. But then who does my work? As an independent writer I used to tell people I spent 40 percent of my time as a salesperson, 30 percent as a dunning agent, 20 percent in office management, and 10 percent in information technology — and in my spare time I did writing work. And that was before the Internet, much less social media. So it’s murderously difficult to both work and blog and Tweet and so forth. But what are the options?

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I really discovered science blogs through Anton Zuiker’s mistersugar.com. I’m in a science writers’ book club with him, and he’s opened my eyes to the nature of blogging and of scientific blogging especially. Science bloggers are such a specific case of people with the right reasons for blogging and such trustworthy sources that they really are an amazing community as well as a resource. I have loved being even such a sort of Kuiper Belt participant. I turn to them for information all the time now. I LOVE deepseanews.com and a blog around the clock, but honestly I find almost anywhere I turn in the world of science blogging I’m lost for hours finding out about stuff I had never even thought to wonder about.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

I would call #scio10 the best conference I’ve ever attended. The session about the future of online communication wondered whether there was any hope for “plain old text blogging” — this at the exact moment that mainstream newspapers are still trying to work out a response to plain old blogging. That makes me feel both hopeless for newspapers and thrilled at the capacities for communication.

But above all #scio10 reminded me what wise people never lose sight of: that “meatspace” is not merely important but the point. With all the Tweeting and blogging and wireless this and Skype that, what brought all those people together was the appreciation of being together. Even with chips in our heads, we’ll remain mammals and real space, real time creatures. I love that #scio never loses track of that, and I think it’s what makes it unique.

It was so nice to see you again and thank you for the interview. Good luck with the new book and see you soon!

Scott Huler at ScienceOnline2010

But it is a Big Deal. It is the ‘official’ conference of the World Wide Web. Yup, Tim Berners-Lee, the guy who invented the Web, was there. I saw him, though I did not talk to him. I mean, what excuse could I come up with to approach him? Ask him to autograph my web browser?

This year, WWW2010 (which everyone pronounced as ‘dub-dub-dub-twenty-ten’ reminding me of a cardiac arrhythmia), was really four conferences fused into one, or rather three other conferences piggybacking onto the main program: Web Science Conference 2010, 7th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility and the one I was most interested in (and could afford to attend) the FutureWeb conference.

Of course, whenever I go to a conference I do two things: one is what everyone does – try to learn as much as possible and meet interesting people; the other thing is a professional deformation of sorts – I observe the details of the organization and try to figure out how to use what I see for the next ScienceOnline.

This is the second conference I attended at the Raleigh Convention Center and this time I felt better about the space – it did not seem so overwhelmingly enormous this time. Perhaps there were more people this time. Or perhaps it’s because the place was filled with vendor booths, including by Google, Facebook, Lulu.com and RedHat. Or perhaps the organizers used the space better. Or perhaps the people were less formal in their dress, behavior and mindset which made the whole experience more pleasurable.

Number 1 requirement for a conference is coffee. And there was plentiful, at all times, both on the ground floor and upstairs, as well as pastries, cake and fruit. Grade: A

Number 2 requirement for a conference is good, free wifi with tons of bandwidth. And WWW2010 got it. It was just as stable and just as fast as at ScienceOnline2010, which says something Grade: A+

Number 3 are people. Apart from the ‘home team’ I mentioned above, it was great to finally meet some of the interesting locals that I only knew from online before, including the entire HASTAC crew led by Cathy Davidson, Annie Antón (watch this video where I first heard of her some time ago), Paolo Mangiafico, Greg Corrin and Negar Mottahedeh. And then the non-locals, e.g., Doc Searls and Kathy Gill.

It was also great to see again, after quite a while, old friends – danah boyd, Dan Conover, Janet Edens, Hilary Spenser and Kate of Save Our Sounds who I first met at the AAAS meeting in San Diego back in February. I really wanted to catch up with Dan and Janet so we went out to dinner and drinks on Thursday afternoon and spent hours talking. Grade: A+

Number 4 requirement for a successful conference is an engaged audience. And there sure was – check out the #fw2010 (futureweb) and #www2010 tweets – there were lots! And people on several panels were really good at monitoring the twitter backchannel and even tweeting themselves during their sessions (Negar Mottahedeh was the champion of this!).

Unfortunately some of the panels were more corporate in tone, with PowerPoint presentations and barely any interaction with the audience besides a couple of Q&As at the very end. In the Public Health session all but the last panelist have even left the room before we could ask them any questions, for example. Oh well, can’t have everything.

Certainly Keynotes are, by design, one-to-many, and most panels I attended were quite nicely many-to-many in a very unconference-y style (especially the one on Social Media where the dialogue between the panelists and the audience started right at the begining), so it’s a bummer that some of the more corporate as well as more academic types did not grok it or were not specifically trained for a modern conference format. Grade: B

Number 5 in my book is diversity. While the attendees as a whole seemed quite balanced and diverse, the talks and panels were quite white-male-dominated or white-male-exclusive, with just a couple of great exceptions, most notably danah boyd. The opposing goals of having the people with the greatest name recognition (which are marketing gold for a meeting) or having a diverse group in which everyone feels comfortable and “an insider” are hard to reconcile. It is not surprising that WWW2010, being so Big Deal, erred somewhat toward the former, while smaller, more obscure conferences (like #scio10) can push more for the latter. But don’t get me wrong – I’ve been to many conferences with a much higher testosterone concentration (and lower melanin) than this one, it just wasn’t quite as perfect as theoretically possible. Grade: B-

Number 5 is the program itself. And that was good. Of course, I had to choose what to attend at each time-slot, but there is excellent coverage and videos of everything here, so you can take your own picks. Part of the deal with FutureWeb conference was that we could also attend three of the main WWW2010 Keynote lectures, by Vint Cerf (Google vice president and chief Internet evangelist), danah boyd (Microsoft and Harvard University’s Berkman Center) and Carl Malamud (president and founder of public.resource.org ) so I did not waste that opportunity and attended all three. Cerf was impressive on search, cloud computing, and universal access. Malamud was funny, yet wise, with his advice on how to deal with bureacracies with outdated ways of thinking and still get things done.

For me, danah boyd’s talk was the very best hour of the entire conference – I had to stop live-tweeting as I wanted to listen and focus. Danah packs her talks with information and insight and I did not want to miss anything. And I was not dissappointed. Both in her keynote address and the interview immediatelly afterwards, danah stressed several points but I want to highlight two:

First, many people are now harvesting information from social networks and running it through mathematical models. Then they get smug about it and assume more than data warrant. Just because you collected a huge number of tweets, for example, does not mean that your sample is representative – which racial, socioeconomic and age groups tend to keep their accounts private, or tend not to use hashtags, keywords or Twitter conventions the way others do? You missed them. And even if you didn’t, are the results of the analysis meaningful. Data, like Soylent Green, are People. Without looking at who they are, what they say and why they say it, the most impressive computing models are suspect.

Second, there is a difference between Public and Publicized. If you put something online with a hope it will go viral and be seen by as many strangers as possible, you have done broadcasting – what you did was Publicizing. But if you put something online with an unspoken understanding that it is targeted at a relatively limited number of people, usually personal friends (on Facebook) or regular readership (on blogs and Twitter), that is only Public, not Publicized. Taking that kind of stuff posted online by someone and spreading it to a much wider audience of strangers (or using that data for ‘scientific research’) is a violation of privacy. It is at best unthinking and tone-deaf, at worst unethical.

And this is the category error that Facebook just made with their new privacy rules. There is a lot of writing online about Facebook settings these days, and the mood of WWW2010 was decidedly anti-Facebook. Some people ‘unliked’ all their ‘likes’ there during sessions discussing privacy. Someone even deleted his facebook account right on the spot, after danah’s keynote.

Everyone knows that everything you post online is ‘fair game’, it is googleable, findable and potentially spreadable. This is the reason why some people need to be anonymous or pseudonymous online. But putting stuff online is not automatically a licence for everyone and anyone to take it and spread it around. Before you do this to someone, stop and think. Perhaps ask if that is OK. Much of the stuff posted online is posted online to make it easy for friends and grandma to see, not for all the world to see. Not every facebook status update or every tweet is a news broadcast. Turn on your brain before you start treating Public (but meant to be limited) communication between friends into a Publicized flashing banner on every corner of the Internet. Remember that people who post stuff online are Soylent Green – they are People.

A great recent example of something Public becoming Publicized against the original intentions of the author was #boobquake. The original idea was an inside joke, meant to be read by perhaps a thousand regular blog readers, some Twitter followers and Facebook friends, not much more. But then someone came in and took it and ran with it. Suddenly this went viral. What could she do? How to deal with this sudden change in expectations? One solution would have been to delete everything and lock everything down – it was not yours to take in the first place, so now you won’t be able to see it and spread it any more. The other solution, the one Jen McCreight chose, was to play along and to switch from Public to Publicized and milk that moment of fame for all its worth and for a good cause. But for this to work, she needed to rethink and rewrite the original to make it fit for Publicized consumption, so she wrote an update with clarification and then a number of updates about the phenomenon. It was out of her hands, but she could still steer it to some extent and make sure it gets used for the intended purpose. Good for her – but she is an experienced blogger, and an activist with an agenda. What if it was some kid, or n00b, or grandma, completely unprepared for it all? Was it her fault she put stuff online? No, you were a schmuck to take her stuff and run with it. Perhaps unethical.

See the full text of danah’s talk for more details, and a recent interview with her on the topic.

Later that day I attended (and vigorously participated from my seat in the front row) the Future of Social Networks and the Internet panel with Chris DiBona, Henry Copeland, Zeynep Tufekci, Dave Recordon and Wayne Sutton, moderated by Fred Stutzman. Henry reminded us that it took 150 years after Gutenberg printed a bible until the founding of the first daily newspaper and that the current situation on the Web is far too early (the oldest blogs are 13 years old) to be considered developed and mature. We need to be patient and watch, not proclaim the experiment a success or a failure so early in its history. Several mentions of the Dunbar Number, in some cases used correctly, in others not, reminded me I need to get back to my project of studying the application of the concept to the Web and writing a piece about it, as much of the discussion focused on the way the Web is affecting our relationships in the real world, for better or for worse.

The Future of the Media panel was the most contentious. Out of six people on it, there was a clear split down the middle: three people who ‘get it’ and three who don’t – on one side were Michael Clemente (lumbering dinosaur), Sam Matheny (a more limber dinosaur), Penny Muse Abernathy (a bird-like dinosaur), still walking yet fully unaware they are already extinct, and on the other side were highly evolved birds: Paul Jones, Dan Conover and Doc Searls. One has to give it to Michael Clemente – knowing that the camera’s rolling and everyone’s livetweeting, he stuck to his Fox News talking points, even asserting, with a straight face, that there is a wall between news and editorial content on Fox News (though that was devastatingly demonstrated to be wrong by Jon Stewart – the opinionators make the news which the news-heads report the next day).

I came in a little late (as our waiters at lunch were incredibly slow with food and checks) into the The Future of Privacy and the Internet session, with a star-studded collection of panelists, including Annie Antón of NCSU who I wanted to meet for quite a while. Much was said about legal and policy aspects of privacy. Antón noted that privacy settings on many social networking sites, including Facebook, are complex and counter-intuitive and that many people (aside from techies) do not know what these are and how to set them. She also said that this is not a generational issue – some people know and some don’t regardless of age. But I think that this will change with time – both the people’s skills at controlling their privacy and the societal understanding of what privacy means and where to draw the line. In 20 years, when the employers are all people with decades experience online, they will find Facebook profiles (or equivalent) completely devoid of humanizing elements (including drinking party pictures) suspect – is this person really that boring or is that an intentionally clean profile of someone with Presidential (or at least Harvard) aspirations? People will, over the years, become increasinly better at managing their online personas, making sure that searches bring up to the top both their accomplishments and their human sides in perfect measures.

The The Future of Public Health session was the biggest disappointment for me. It was not even a panel – four people got up, gave their PowerPoint presentations and left the room before any questions could be asked. And their presentations fell short of my expectations – I know how much stuff is going on out there, but each speaker focused only on what he/she is currently working on, their own projects, not the state of the field as a whole.

Finally, the conference ended with a Bang – an exciting panel on The Future of Learning:

“Session organizer was Cathy Davidson co-founder of HASTAC – the Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (http://www.hastac.org/). Panelists included Laurent Dubois, a Duke University historian of French colonialism and the Caribbean; Mark Anthony Neal, accomplished author, one of the foremost scholars of Black popular culture in America and blogger at the New Black Man website; Negar Mottahedeh, she received national notice for staging the first-ever Twitter Film Festival as well as for serving as a communications node in the Iranian election protests.; Tony O’Driscoll, co-author of “Learning in 3D: Adding a New Dimension to Enterprise Learning and Collaboration.”"

These people are all on the cutting edge of the educational revolution involving understanding the way technology (Web) is changing the world, the way students operate, and the way education should be done. Their students use the Web in the classroom, publicly grade each other (leading to a much greater motivation and effort and greater quality of work), use Twitter to communicate, and are savvy at using the Web to find information. One person in the audience said that ‘if I open my laptop, my focus on you, the teacher, drops down from 100% to 0%’, I got up and said ‘if I open my laptop and you have a problem with me not listening – you are doing it wrong: you are standing in front and talking. Instead, you should be here with me, next to me, working with me on my laptop.’ I also added that there is an existing model for a more engaging model of a teacher-student relationship and that is graduate school where the teacher/mentor does not lecture, but assigns a project and mentors the student through it.

Program – grade: A

I want to end this summary with a huge Kudos to the Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center, an Elon/Pew Internet Project which has been ongoing for quite a few years now, guided by center director Janna Quitney Anderson. The Elon students from the project manned a booth, attended (anywhere between two and six of them per room) every session and manned the cameras (both the big professional camera and a bunch of little Flip cameras) in each session. They set up the website, covered every single session and talk with a nice blog post and associated articles and videos, livetweeted, used Facebook for organizing and archiving stuff, collected photographs on Flickr and videos on YouTube. They were not just very good, but also very fast – before a session is over the clips from its beginning were already up on YouTube! And at least one of them writes an insightful blog – Kassondra Cloos. Grade: A+

The video coverage was so awesome (and it was the weakest aspect of ScienceOnline2010 organization), that I am seriously considering hiring the Elon student crew to do the same job at ScienceOnline2011. I’ll be in touch with them soon.

Today, I asked Ernie Hood to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around the Clock. Would you please tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

Hi Bora. Thanks for your interest, and for all that you do.

I’m one of those science writers who comes to the profession from the writing side as opposed to the science side. I have a BA in English from Brown University and an MA in Communications from UNC-Chapel Hill. After grad school, I worked in local television news for a few years (great training for working on tight deadlines), and then a partner and I started a video and audio production company, where I plied my trade for the ensuing twenty years. Working with science-based corporate clients such as Glaxo-GlaxoWellcome-GSK, Rhone Poulenc, Ciba Giegy, Organon Teknika and many more, I eventually discovered my love of science and an ability to communicate scientific concepts simply and effectively. In 2003, after dabbling in science writing on the side for a few years, I elected to pursue it full time. Becoming a freelancer was and is nerve-wracking (just ask one), but I’ve never looked back and thoroughly enjoy what I do.

I like to think that my work makes some small contribution to bettering the world through enhanced appreciation of science–that’s much more rewarding than contributing to some corporation’s profit margin. And I’ve found that scientists are much easier to work with and more appreciative of quality work.

Geographically, I was born and raised in a suburb of Boston (go Sox!), spent some years in Florida, moved to Chapel Hill in 1976 to attend grad school (go Heels!), and have been here in the Triangle ever since. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

I’ve been fortunate to work on a wide variety of engaging projects over the course of my career. For example, in the mid-90s my production company produced a weekly, national magazine show on PBS called BreakThrough: Television’s Journal of Science and Medicine, which aired on more than 200 stations, won several international awards, and was warmly received by the scientific community. I was Senior Writer on the show, contributing studio and promotional copy while supervising and editing the work of our team of reporter/field producers. It was an intense experience that has served me well to this day in terms of developing a passion for the science and for getting it right without pandering or sensationalizing.

In my second career as a science writer, I’ve written more than 80 articles for Environmental Health Perspectives, the monthly journal published by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, the flagship journal in the environmental health field. I’ve attended numerous scientific conferences and written meeting reports. I’ve written or edited several book chapters, including twice contributing chapters to the NIH Director’s Biennial Report to Congress. I’ve even been a co-author of two peer-reviewed publications, which was quite a thrill for this English major. I also perform a variety of writing and editing tasks for several academicians around the country. More recently, drawing on my media production experience, I’ve been producing podcasts for several clients–great fun.

What is taking up most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

Much (too much!) of my time these days is taken up by two volunteer labors of love–my radio show and SCONC.

For the past four years, I’ve hosted a weekly science interview radio show on WCOM-FM in Carrboro, North Carolina, called Radio In Vivo: Your Link to the Triangle Science Community. Each week I bring in a Triangle-area scientist and we discuss his or her work for an hour, which allows a thorough, in-depth examination. I’ve had guests from all walks of science (including Bora Z himself, of course!). It’s quite a challenge to book new guests and prepare for each week’s show, sometimes on a rather steep learning curve, but I never tire of helping scientists communicate about their work and promoting the scientific enterprise here in the Triangle. There are now more than 140 hour-long shows in the archive at the program’s website, radioinvivo.net. I also serve on three different committees at the radio station, doing what I can to help support and sustain WCOM–a remarkable example of all-volunteer community radio at its best.

I’ve also had the honor and privilege of serving as president of Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC) since 2009. We put on events monthly at area venues, typically featuring a speaker or two along with time for socializing, networking, and good food and drink. We seek to aid our members’ work opportunities and professional development, and to showcase the extremely important function our profession fulfills, serving as the vital liaison between the scientific community and the diverse audiences to be addressed.

Goals? Well, the chances of playing left field for the Red Sox or being a rock star or a pro bass fisherman seem increasingly remote these days, so I guess today I’ll settle for maintaining my health, watching my daughters thrive as adults, and eventually, dare I say it, hanging out with some grand-kids!

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I think my favorite element of science communication is simply the joy of constantly discovering fascinating new developments, and sometimes having the opportunity to introduce them to a wider audience. I don’t need to remind your readers how cool science is, and it’s thrilling to use the many new tools at our disposal to send that message out to folks who do need to be reminded–or informed in the first place…or disabused of misconceptions and misinformed opinions. We need all of the virtual weapons we can get in our ongoing battle against ignorance, apathy, and politically motivated misrepresentation.

How does blogging figure in your work? How about social networks? Do you find all of this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

So far I don’t blog, and I marvel at people like you who do, and who generate so much material all the time. When you say A Blog Around the Clock, I think you must mean that you actually do blog around the clock, and I can’t begin to understand how you aren’t chronically sleep-deprived. I do follow several blogs, such as yours, Terra Sigillata, Deep Sea News, Science in the Triangle, and Mister Sugar, for example. Also I consult blogs frequently in the course of my reporting and writing work and when preparing for radio interviews.

As for social networks, I am on Facebook and Twitter, although I tend to lurk more than actively post. I just can’t imagine anyone caring what mood I might be in at any given time, or the fact that I’m drinking coffee somewhere. With that caveat in mind, I do find the networks to be valuable for staying in touch with the professional community and for publicizing new editions of the radio show and upcoming SCONC events. Sometimes it’s difficult to ignore all the chatter – the social networks are quite addictive and can be a distraction. On the other hand, they’re a great way to keep one’s ears to the ground. Does the word ambivalent come to mind?

What was the best aspect of Science Online 2010 for you?

This was my third year at the conference, and it just keeps getting better and more valuable. I was especially pleased at the breadth of the content this year, with the program expanding far beyond its roots in strictly covering science blogging. As we’ve seen, the many disparate elements of science communication are blending together in exciting new ways, and the meeting certainly reflected that trend. Also, as so many of your respondents have mentioned, it was a terrific opportunity to meet and interact with some of the most accomplished people in our field, face to face in “meat space.”

I was one of the recipients of a Flip video camera at the conference, and spent a good bit of time shooting interviews and posting them to YouTube. I was amazed by the quality of the image emerging from a camera the size of a transistor radio, the 2-hour digital recording capacity of the device, and the ease of operation and uploading. Took me way back to my TV news days, when it took two people and a camera and recorder weighing 40 pounds each to shoot on 15-minute tapes the size of a hard-back book. We’ve come a very long way! It’s exciting to contemplate the potential uses for this groundbreaking technology – I’m sure we’re just seeing our first glimpses of its capabilities and possible applications. From now on, there’s little excuse not to have video in our scientific communications when it’s become so easy and so powerful. I just hope we’ll keep the quality up and not put out mediocre material just because we can. We don’t do that in our writing, and we should not succumb to the temptation to do so in other communications. Small soapbox issue there…

Thanks, Bora – see you next year at Science Online 2011!

Thank you so much for the interview. And see you at the next SCONC event!

Today, I asked Sabine Vollmer to answer a few questions:

Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is your (scientific) background?

I’m a journalist by trade and a thrill seeker by nature. There’s nothing more thrilling to me than Eureka! moments, my own and those of others. That’s why I chose to study journalism instead of biochemistry, why I left Germany to come to the U.S., why I enjoy reporting more than writing. Writing keeps me sane, but finding out stuff I didn’t know keeps me going. In the more than 20 years I worked for newspapers, I covered just about everything: Crime (too emotionally draining), politics (too much hot air), business (too much granularity, not enough color) and science. I got stuck on science about 10 years ago after moving
to North Carolina’s Research Triangle and the Eureka! moments keep on coming.

Becoming a science writer was a logical step for me, because I’ve always been interested in science, particularly in biology and chemistry. I took a heavy load of biochemistry classes in high school (German high school is different from American high school), but selected mass communication as my major at the university in Munich. I have never regretted my decision, because it has allowed me to experience scientific breakthroughs without having to toil in the lab doing experiments over and over again.

Tell us a little more about your career trajectory so far: interesting projects past and present?

Most of my expertise is in the life sciences. My sweet spot is where business and research intersect, mainly because those stories dominate in the RTP area. I moved here to cover biotech, pharma and health care for the Triangle Business Journal and then switched to the News & Observer to essentially write about the same things.

About a year ago, my job at the N&O got cut in a massive, nationwide McClatchy layoff, which so far has been largely a blessing. Now, I get to focus more on the science than the business angles, I get to mingle with scientists and I have more outlets. In the past year, I met three Nobel Prize laureates, including Ada Yonath, a 2009 winner in chemistry. Compare that to a big, fat 0 in the previous eight years while I was a staff writer with a regular paycheck and benefits.

My stories are now published on Science in the Triangle, an online publication that tracks research activities in the RTP area, and in the Science & Technology pages in the N&O and the Charlotte Observer.

Science in the Triangle is a current interesting project. Past interesting projects include a story about AZT, the first HIV/AIDS drug that was developed in RTP, and a couple of investigative stories about laser assisted in-situ keratomileusis, or LASIK. The AZT story was a doorway into HIV/AIDS research, a very active area in RTP, and Harvard Medical School picked it up and posted it on its Web site. The LASIK stories have since garnered the interest of a national magazine.

I’m still waiting for the curse part to hit.

What is taking up the most of your time and passion these days? What are your goals?

The RTP area generates a wealth of research in a number of different disciplines. Until four or five years ago, local media did an adequate job chronicling the activities. But when the bottom fell out in the newspaper industry, the local science coverage started to decline in quality and quantity. I just couldn’t bear the thought that all this local knowledge would become largely inaccessible to the general public and that the research silos that exist would become more impenetrable. I couldn’t and I can’t imagine how that would improve an area I came to appreciate for its intellectual vitality and cultural diversity.

I spend a lot of time applying my skills and expertise trying to fill the holes in the local science coverage, generate enough income to help feed and house the family and learn from the mistakes my former employers made and are still making.

My goal is to make a national name for myself writing about research and development in the RTP area.

What aspect of science communication and/or particular use of the Web in science interests you the most?

I’d like to see a business model for online science writing emerge that values quality content and provides broad access to new ideas.

How does (if it does) blogging figure in your work? How about social networks, e.g., Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook? Do you find all this online activity to be a net positive (or even a necessity) in what you do?

Blogs come in different flavors. I’m trying to find time to start a personal blog and keep it going. For now, most of my blogging is for Science in the Triangle, where I provide information and analysis rather than opinion. I absolutely love Twitter, because it’s fast and insightful if you follow the right people. Basically, I use Twitter like a science wire service, to get ideas and to distribute blog posts. My twitter handle is @SciTri. I’m also on Facebook and LinkedIn. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, but I wouldn’t want to be without any of my social networks.

When and how did you first discover science blogs? What are some of your favourites? Have you discovered any cool science blogs by the participants at the Conference?

I’m still discovering them and have yet to form much of an opinion. I do find them very interesting as blueprints of publishing alternatives to the traditional, or “dead-tree” as you call it, media.

What was the best aspect of ScienceOnline2010 for you? Any suggestions for next year? Is there anything that happened at this Conference – a session, something someone said or did or wrote – that will change the way you think about science communication, or something that you will take with you to your job, blog-reading and blog-writing?

The Eureka! moments, of course. It was my first ScienceOnline conference and I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was great. It brought me up-to-date with a world I realized I knew nothing about as a staff writer for the dead-tree media. The networking was particularly fruitful for me. What I hope next year’s conference will address more and more specifically is a possible business model for online science writing. We need to figure out how to shift from paper to online and still be able to pay the bills.

It is great working with you. I am glad you made it to ScienceOnline2010 and thank you for the interview.