A cranky old lady reviews Pinterest (for SCIENCE)

Pinterest keeps popping up in the news, and I’m constantly getting notifications that “Jane Schmo pinned something!”  As someone who bills herself as a social media goddess, I clearly needed to check this Pinterest thing out.  Some background:

“Pinterest is a pinboard-style social photo sharing website. The service allows users to create and manage theme-based image collections….In January 2012, Pinterest drove more referral traffic to retailers than LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google+ combined (source)….Pinterest is definitely worth taking a look at, particularly if your audience is female, likes pretty things and likes buying online.”

Wel, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. *cough*

Essentially, it’s online shopping in a million stores.  The Pinterest mission is to “connect everyone through the “things“ they find interesting.” And it is, certainly, about THINGS.

Pinterest is basically Delicious with pretty pictures. Delicious is/was a useful bookmarking site to help you re-find cool stuff that you saw on the web.  The need to save links somewhere other than your browser tool bar is a common one; Pinterest has figured out how to turn that into traffic-driving merch.

A couple of features Pinterest has that might be interesting to scientists:

• You can allow friends to share and pin onto your boards–so I could crowdsource my insect music collection, for example, for a more comprehensive list of resources.
• The board discovery feature allows people who might not traditionally be connected to the science community (i.e, women that like pretty things and shopping) to see that there are scientists that share their interests, or that have interesting things to offer
• You can create unexpected resources–a board of insect recipes, for example, might be a good way to expose people to the concept of entomophagy; a collection of plans for building native bee boxes might help people find them more easily.

There are also a lot of things that don’t work at all on Pinterest, or that are poorly designed. If you want to re-arrange your pins on a board so that your favorites are at the top, or related things are together–you can’t do that.  Things are stuck in the order you pinned them in.   Which, if your purpose for using the site is to save and organize your bookmarks, destroys some of its usefulness.

I have tried several times to pin things (like insect recipes!) that I wasn’t able to pin because there were no images on the web page.  That makes the bookmark utility of the site moot.

The toggles for privacy levels are confusing, and I constantly have to stop and do a search (on an external site, since Pinterest Help documentation is minimal) to figure out how to make it STOP subscribing me to people, or to unsubscribe from the automatic connections Pinterest creates.

This screen is a good example of some of the strange interface choices.  If I want to unsubscribe to the person, the Unfollow button is faded out.  But…that is actually the active button.  And red usually means stop.  Eh?

I freely admit to being a curmudgeon, so you may find Pinterest more interesting than I did.  I don’t feel a need for something like Pinterest.  I don’t shop a lot, and I find the way that it’s difficult to see the original source of the image a bit problematic (as, apparently, do a lot of other people).

I’m pretty much with Abraham Lincoln on this one:  ”People who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

On the other hand, I really, really want these tights with ants on them.

UPDATE 3/19/12: Symbiartic has an alarming look at the terms of service for Pinterest, from the standpoint of an artist. Rather disturbing!

ScienceOnline2012 Postmortem (and a book review)

When I got back from ScienceOnline, my boss asked me how it went.  (I was sort of AWOL from the first week of class, and she was not real thrilled about that.)   “It was one of the greatest experiences of my life” was my response.  That’s what I feel–but I’ve been trying to figure out WHY.

You can see the full list of attendees here–it’s a really fascinating bunch.  To name check just a few:  Wired. BoingBoing. Nature. Science. Ed Yong. Carl Zimmer. Museums. And, uh, independent blogger/social media types like me.  And so here I am, feeling like a little bug scuttling among giant writers. And I discover…that people actually read my shit. And know who the hell I am. Whoa.

Everyone was geeked about science and about communicating science.  IT WAS AWESOME.  But Why was it so awesome? I think Ed Yong nails it in his summary–we “knew” everyone before we arrived. Even though I hadn’t ever met 447 of the 450 folks attending in meatspace, I had chatted with them online, commented on their blogs, and read their books. From further discussion in the comments from David Dobbs:

“The steady message, via the unconference idea, that it’s a relatively level playing field — or, as someone put it on Twitter, that it’s not experts and non-experts, but different people all bringing different experiences in areas we’re all interested in. It’s a steady insistence that it’s not a producer-consumer model, with the audience full of consumers, but rather a conversation.

The other key, it seems to me, is that it’s a fairly balanced mix of mainly-scientists and mainly-journalists/communicators, so it’s not a single peer group, as it were — not a single discipline. There’s always this chemistry of excitement, of mixing with another tribe. To me that’s an important part of what distinguishes ScienceOnline. And I think it helps create the sense of humility and egalitarianism: Prominence in one area doesn’t make anyone top dog at this conference, because even the most distinguished people in one area are among not just their own discipline’s peers but amid those of another discipline in which they have little expertise or distinction.”

Just before I went to ScienceOnline, I read a book called Cognitive Surplus.  And it kind of blew my mind.  Shirky’s central thesis is that the web and the relatively large amount of leisure time in the first world (i.e, time not spent working for the man, or raising our food) has created an amazing opportunity.

We kill a lot of that free time in very unimaginative ways.  Americans spend 200 BILLION hours each year watching television. What if all that brain power was directed toward something?  Shirky posits a surplus of creative energy exists, and is only beginning to be tapped.  For example, take the humble LOLcat:

“Formed quickly and with a minimum of craft, the average LOLcat has the social value of a whoopie cushion and the lifespan of a mayfly.  Yet anyone seeing a LOLcat gets a second unrelated message: You can play this game too.”

The internet bridges the gap between doing nothing and doing something.  Creating a LOLcat is more than passive consumption of pre-packaged TV shows…and opens the door to doing other original things.

Time and space are not a constraint to community formation–ideas or passions now bring people together, rather than physical locations.  Scientists that blog online–even when it’s looked down upon by fellow scientists? We are modeling positive deviance.  It’s not so much what we write that is important, but THAT WE WRITE AT ALL.

We are creating a model for a new way of science communication.  And we are having a bitchin’ time doing it, which invites new people over to have fun with us.  You can play this game too.   We are showing lots of different ways to share science online to our friends, our friends’ friends, and to the random strange people who keep searching my blog for “sex with insects.”

It’s a kind of nerdibacter called social contagion.  The internet creates social change among total strangers. Think it’s too sparkly-kumbaya to really work?  Just look at an example from earlier this month: A shark researcher calls out a company for sponsoring a shark hunt.  He manages to mobilize an amazing network via Twitter, and the company not only pulls the promotion, but blacklists the person from ever posting with them again.  And that all played out within the space of one day.

Small individual creative acts (tweets or blog posts) can become a thing of lasting value.  Shared and unmanaged effort can produce useful and meaningful results.  No one is in charge, and that’s OK. The beauty of the web is that we don’t all have to have the same motivations, or skills, or professional level of skill. We don’t all have to be working toward the same goal.  We can still make change happen simply by putting our ideas out there.  And the value of that work isn’t from professional production values; it’s from the sharing.

A lot of the attendees at SciOnline were people like me–folks who don’t get paid to write about science. We do our thing (write, podcast, tweet, whatever) simply for the love of it.  And we are wearers of many hats–as Bora reports in his ScienceOnline2012 wrap-up post:

According to our registration form report, ScienceOnline2012 had 243 bloggers, 153 journalists, 151 scientists, 115 educators, 71 students, 43 enterpreneurs, 34 Web developers and 46 who identified as ‘other’. That total is almost 900, so on average everyone (457 people checked in at the registration desk) checked two boxes.

Even though the US is clearly falling apart politically, in a lot of ways SciOnline left me more optimistic and hopeful about the future than I’ve been for a long time.  All these people doing something because of a passion for science–it was wonderful.

Kevin is right:

“Magical things can happen when you enthusiastically open your mouth on the internet….Looking into others causes you to look into yourself. And then something really magical happens – we learn we are not alone.”

I will totally be up at 1AM next year trying to get a seat for ScienceOnline2013.  But you know what? If I don’t get a seat?  Or if I don’t have the time or energy to keep blogging/tweeting/whatevering at the same rate I do now?

It’s ok. The kids have it covered.

Entomology and Social media: the movie!

Well, sort of.  At the Entomological Society National Meeting, several bloggers and twits were interviewed about their experiences with social media.

I also discovered that Morgan has a video of his talk on YouTube too!

Transcript of my ESA talk about Social Media

Sorry this took so long to create! This is the transcript of my Entomological Society of America talk that I posted last week. I have taken the liberty of editing and prettifying things up, and including some feedback on the draft version I got.  You can download the PDF handout from this talk here, including some recommended links and resources.
I am still not happy with this, mostly because the topic is so huge, and there is so much very good info and thoughtful stuff out there. This isn’t meant to be comprehensive, but hopefully this will help you find some new ideas to chew on.  Without further ado:

The Adventures of Bug Girl
OR: Everything you wanted to know about entomological social media but were afraid to ask

In a 12 minute talk, I tried to address these topics:

• Why do this social media stuff, anyway?
• Why was Bug Girl successful?
• How can you measure your success?  (An overview; I’ll leave the question of tools you can use to measure and assess online success for a separate post/presentation.)
• How can YOU become an online entomology goddess?

How to become an online social media goddess

As promised (threatened?) here is the first draft of my Entomological Society of America Talk. I will probably update this later on, and I invite feedback.  Clearly, I need to cut even more out to fit into the 10 minute limitation.  I’ll be putting together a second screencast to cover how to measure broader impacts online with more specifics and tools later this month.

I have used some screenshots from public conversations on Twitter or on my blog in this; if you do not want them used in this way, please let me know!

Here is the Transcript, and a link to my handout.

Bug Girl Explains it all for you

I was away last week having an awesome time at a conference last week–saw some amazing birds, some marine mammals, had a hellish but cool boat ride, and got to talk to a lot of scientists.  I did a presentation there on social media for scientists and research stations, and it was really well recieved.

Actually, more than one person said “that should have been a plenary session,”  which I am still really, really geeked about!

So–Since few of my readers were able to attend that conference, or the Entomological Society meeting that I’ll be presenting at in November, I thought I would break things into a series of “Social Media for Scientists” posts.  There are some very good existing resources, but they don’t seem to be detailed enough to be useful to people that I’ve recommended them to.

People seem to want instructions along the line of “How do I…” more than “Why do I….”
But you know, we’re scientists. We’re all about procedure.

So–I asked some of this in an earlier post, but to get a more detailed read, here’s a poll!

Previous Unsolicited Advice Series at the Bug Blog:

• Getting into and choosing a Graduate School
• Career advice

Tell me what you want

I got the official notification of my time in the Social Media Symposium for the Entomological Society of America Annual Meeting. The official symposium:

Speak Out – Interaction and Education in a Brave New World of Social Media and Online Resources
Tuesday, November 15, 2011: 1:30 PM-5:45 PM

A lot of the symposium will focus on Extension, but there will also be some familiar names. Now that I’ve seen the lineup, I’m feeling a bit like “one of these things is not like the others.”

I’m the last person to talk, right after Eric Eaton. And honestly, I love Eric, but we could not be less alike.  The strongest language I think I’ve ever heard him use is “darn!”  (He may also have said “Blast!” once as well. But I don’t like to spread rumors.)

So, I am thinking of talking mostly about how to measure your impact, both with various social media metrics and intangibly. I hope to hit the one million mark on this blog before November, and that doesn’t even count the people who read my posts at Skepchick.   I also was thinking of talking about building a brand, or maybe the tradeoff between anonymity and a real name.

I have exactly 10 minutes to talk, so I can really only cover one topic. What do YOU want to hear about?

Operation Gadfly: Bug Minions, Activate!

I have a cunning plan (with apologies to Baldrick).  I’m applying to this job with LibraryThing:

“LibraryThing is hiring a bookish, social-media savvy employee. We want someone passionate about books and about book lovers, and excited to take social cataloging and bookish social networking to the next level.”

Like all scientists everywhere, I’m borrowing and refining a proven technique.  If you would like to help LibraryThing hire an ÜberNerd (i.e, ME), please tweet this:

{removed since Operation Gadfly ended successfully}

This is an experiment (science again!) to see if I can socially engineer an interview

I haven’t quite figured out what I can do to thank you if you participate–feel free to post your demands in the comments.

You all have been so incredibly kind to me over the last 5 years, as you’ve read about my battles with random wingnuttery,  shared my love of our creepy crawly brethren, and (hopefully) watched my writing improve.  I am humbled by your support.  (and don’t worry, I will only do this ONCE.  It might be an experiment, but I won’t replicate it.)

Thanks everyone!

EDITED 11/1/2010 TO ADD: Holy Crap! I thought this might be a neat way to make LibraryThing know who I was and that I knew about social media. I succeeded beyond my wildest expectations! (See the comments for some links to screen shots).  I am, once again, so grateful and humble for your help.  I sound like a bumbling Miss America contestant, but…*sniff*

I LOVE YOU GUYS! GROUP HUG!