Hello,
My name is Dan Pollock, and I am responsible for nature.com, of which Nature Network is an important part. I have been reading the recent discussions about your concerns around Nature Network, both in terms of its functionality and its future direction. At this point in the discussion I think it is appropriate for me to step in to reassure you on both counts.
Before I do, I would first like to thank you all for your feedback and the interesting discussions taking place. I think you raise some important issues, both for the specific Nature Network community, and for “science and social media in general”.
The background to our efforts is that NN represents an on-going commitment to facilitate new and emerging mechanisms for scientific communication. As with any such project, it has evolved over the years, and I would first like to reassure you that we remain committed to NN, and to addressing the needs of the community it serves, both now and in the future.
As you have unfortunately experienced, the transition of your blogs from the old Nature Network system onto the Moveable Type blogging platform has been less smooth than we would have liked and for that I apologise. We understand that the tools available to bloggers have improved since we first launched the site over 3 years ago, so it became clear that we needed to offer you the sort of blogging tools (such as monitoring stats and customising blogs) you could find elsewhere. We therefore took the decision to migrate to the MT4 platform. Through this we wish to give you as much practical support as we can in providing you with your own blog, while continuing to host it within the Nature Network family, and laying a solid foundation that will take us forward. Please rest assured that we are still committed to making this happen and I hope the recent updates that Lou has shared with you about our progress on this demonstrate we are now taking positive corrective action to bring this about. I’d like to thank you for your perseverance with us while we resolve the remaining technical issues – which we are now doing – and to reassure you that things will be much improved by the Autumn.
On the question of where Nature Network fits into the bigger picture of nature.com, this is a good time to have raised this issue, as it is something we have been discussing internally in recent months. We are committed to NN’s on-going development – indeed, we believe that as our end users, it is important that you have a channel through which you can inform us of your needs and hopes for the site, so you can help shape our vision. We therefore propose to run some focus groups to canvas your input. We have yet to finalise the details, however please rest assured that this is a priority for us. If you would be interested in participating, please let Lou know (l.woodley@nature.com) and she can keep you informed as our plans unfold.
Meanwhile, I would like to thank you for your on-going support.
Regards,
Dan Pollock
Associate Director, nature.com
Thanks for the update! I hope the technical issues will be resolved soon.
I know (first-hand, even) that there have been a lot of changes in your department in the past years, and I know that even minor decisions can take a long time within a company, but from the perspective of a blogger here it has been incredibly frustrating to be promised features years ago and still not have them, so even updates about why it’s taking so long are much appreciated.
Seconded – thanks for the update!
Hi Dan – I echo Eva’s and Cath’s appreciation that you have stepped out of the back office to post this. It certainly provides some re-assurance.
But I can’t help thinking that a more definitive statement about future directions is warranted at this juncture. It’s good that you plan to have focus groups to poll opinion but plenty of opinions have already been shared on the private bloggers forum and are now spilling out one various people’s blogs – two more today.
The MT4 problems are too long-standing but are solvable. But one of the broader issues, which many people have articulated already, is the requirement for registration on NN for anyone who wishes to comment.
Since it is widely known that most blog readers don’t comment, a clear aim for any blogging platform has to be to increase accessibility, to find ways to facilitate the conversation. It reduces the point of blogging if the fabric of the network is an impediment to discussion. I don’t think a focus group is needed to identify or resolve this issue.
I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this.
Thanks for commenting Dan, it is much appreciated.
The sentiments are getting expressed, and there are common threads. I would suggest that making changes where possible and explaining why others are not possible is a major first step. The Scienceblogs implosion taught us that lack of communication between admin (you) & staff (us) is the biggest issue.
I want to know when we can expect the following, and if they’re not possible, why not.
1. An open commenting policy – encourage people to join The Network, but give casual commenters the option not to.
2. Access to individual blog stats. I want to see my hit rate, bounce rate, keywords, time on site, entry and exit pages.
3. The ability to customize, even within guidelines if need be. I want a blogroll as a bare minimum, and I’d also like to add a custom banner and whatever other widgets and fun I want – nerd score, Atheist “A”, “Free the West Memphis 4” or whatever. Each blog is a personal journey and diary, and these are important to the ‘fell’ of the blog, the ‘soul’ of the blog, even if they are non-Network/non-Nature focused.
I’d also like to be involved in any discussions about how to divide the Network vs. non-Network content and home page design so as to drive traffic to the Network Blogs and not have us buried beneath masses of out of date posts from other science networks.
I infer from this that you don’t know either! Actually, I’m fine with this, but is there any reason not to have this discussion in public? That way you’re more likely to get good ideas about NN’s possible future directions: please listen to the community (not just within NN, but also the wider science blogging community).
Dan – I also echo the sentiments from my colleagues (compadres? associates? people I’ve never met, except electronically?) above, and am glad to see (hear? read?) the position of someone in authority. However, for me the answer is simple – the MT4 experiment is a complete disaster, and I for one find those ten, twenty, thirty seconds every time I click on anything to be an irritating
wasteexpenditurewaste of my time.Forget the “walled garden”, forget the useful tools and widgets for the bloggers, forget the “big picture” (or lack thereof) – if your community forum is painfully slow and irritatingly lacking in functionality (log in every time I want to comment on each and every separate blog, hmmm?) – nobody is going to visit.
I would apologize for the rant, but honestly, this is the 21st century and for goodness’ sake, a blinkin’ phone has more functionality than Nature Network.
I, for one, will happily visit Cromercrox, VWXYnot, BioLOG, Easternblot, Lablit, and any number of other blogs run by my favourites here, but NN – sorry.
Dan, please accept my apologies in advance. I share Richard’s and others’ well-expressed sentiments; to me, your comment:
sounds suspiciously like vacuous management-speak that one often gets to hear in a corporate environment. Canvas our input? Would you kindly address the raised question about what steps have been taken (or are in the pipeline) with regard to the multitude of issues that have been voiced by many of the NN’s regular bloggers? Perhaps a separate entry for the raised issues and steps taken is warranted (I am thinking, in the style of bug report wiki pages)?
This is not to disrespect or disparage the wonderful work done by Lou and Matt. They are always helpful, and they try to respond to specific questions as best as they can. But at times it does seem that they are the lone public faces of ‘management’, bravely guarding the entrance to some arcane establishment, within which clandestine operations are going on to determine the fate of the world… Okay, may be not. But, as recent events elsewhere have also shown (hint, hint!), bloggers in any platform appreciate:
(a) a certain amount of transparency on part of the management,
(b) the ability to interact meaningfully with management as and when needed.
On the question of where Nature Network fits into the bigger picture of nature.com, this is a good time to have raised this issue, as it is something we have been discussing internally in recent months.
I would have thought someone looked at that before investing so much effort, especially since it affected our blogs’ functionality so profoundly.
Dan, thank you for stepping up, but your message is not very helpful. I think the fundamental misunderstanding here is that, while employees of a big corporation such as NPG may be forced to put up with a certain amount of company politics, management speak and business tactics, non of us bloggers here have any stakes whatsoever in that part.
The background to our efforts is that NN represents an on-going commitment to facilitate new and emerging mechanisms for scientific communication.
That is fine, but we are not going to be the hapless lab rats for this big NPG experiment. We’re more like a bag of educated, rather opinionated flees – and if you want us to stay part of this, we need transparency and real feedback.
I assume that NN was first set up as a “Facebook for scientists”, but that hasn’t really worked. So now it has a bit of an identity crisis. Poor thing – and in the last couple of days bits of it have been dropping off.
I agree with everyone’s sentiments above (both the positive and the more reserved ones); even if I’ve already left the stable on an official basis, it didn’t mean I couldn’t wander back in from time to time.
Dan, if it was not very clear already, I wanted to point out a common feature among everyone who commented here and many who have spoken up in the numerous other NN threads, rants, complaints, and forums (I still really want to type “fora”!) that discuss small details and big pictures:
We all want this to work. We really do. We don’t want to have to look elsewhere. Or at least, we didn’t. A few have thrown in the towel out of frustration, but I suspect that some quick thinking and held promises could staunch the bleeding and attract back some talent and/or other established writers. And strategically, one can learn from criticism. At least, that’s what the editors assure us on a regular basis.
Of course, there is an unlimited pool of talent out there. But you are building a brand and an identity, after all, and you may as well not reinvent the wheel. Many suggestions can be found here, and many of them are excellent. But Nature will have to move fast, or else start completely over with respect to its blogging network strategy (I can’t speak for the rest of the NN site, much of which seems very functional.)
Please let us rather savvy users help you construct and confer upon this site the success we all want it to have. It will certainly reflect well upon NPG. Because all of us who have been invested over a period ranging from weeks to years in blogging here, are intimately involved in conducting and communicating science in our various ways, it will fulfil NPG’s stated goal to host “new and emerging mechanisms” that meet the different needs of scientists as well as the intelligent lay public interested in science.
Probably your proposal for “focus groups” is similar to our repeated requests, transmitted through ever-patient intermediaries, to have input and be heard, and that the most-requested features be implemented. No need to ask for these again. However, it would be very effective from a communications standpoint to try to address the points raised in the nine comments you’ve received now, on this terrain (ie. as a comment reply). Even “I can’t answer that right now and here is why” will demonstrate that you and those you’ve come here to represent are thinking about it, and we’d all appreciate knowing that.
We scientists love explicit and convincing demonstrations. 🙂
@Steffi, I ain’t no flea! My knee is too bad for jumping around on demand. But I can bite irritatingly, I suppose.
I agree with almost all of the comments above, especially those regarding the need for a more clear definition of the purpose of NN and the blogs herein. But, on the purely technical side, I thought I’d just give my perspective as someone who started blogging very recently. As such, I have only ever known the MT4 platform (my NN blog is my first ever blog) and I actually find it very intuitive and easy to use, and have simply not had the problems mentioned above regarding slowness etc. Some additional features might be nice (e.g. the kinds of things Ian suggests – individual blog stats, open commenting, etc.), but one of the things I like is that I have not had to learn anything more technical than a few html tags in order to post here. So, if more innovations and opportunities for personalising the blogs are to be introduced, it would be nice if these too were idiot proof, so I could use them!
@Heather Hear hear. Perfectly put, and I wish I’d written that myself (though I’d have taken twice as many words to do it).
@Tom – Blogger and WordPress are very similar on-screen set-ups to MT4 – at least the visible and text-entry bits – e.g. WordPress has a WYSIWYG editor (which looks broadly like MS Word, with buttons above the text pane for functionality) or a “reveal formatting” setting for code-freaks. So I think what you say is true for all the main blogging platforms.
The thing is that (e.g.) WordPress has other stuff too, and it all largely works. Visible categories (index terms) for posts is one key one, so that people can see e.g. a category cloud, click the word/category they want, and get a list of all your posts on the topic of “funding”. Grrlscientist listed a bunch of this kind of stuff that we don’t have on NN/MT4 – though fingers crossed for the Autumn.
Anyway, it is this kind of thing that underlies the frustration of those who have come to MT4 from other platforms. But I agree, MT4 has a perfectly functional editor.
Austin – thanks for ruining my state of blissful ignorance. Now I want more features too!
Hi everyone,
Just to let you know that Dan is travelling to a conference today so he’s offline, but will post a response to your comments as soon as he can.
I’m in complete agreement with Richard W. above, regarding the slowness and lack of functionality with MT4. Although I’ve had a blog here at NN since 2008, I still feel like an outsider in many ways (and I’ve never been able to access the “private bloggers’ forum”, even with the URL that was provided at Richard G.‘s request recently). That isn’t really important, and I certainly don’t think that NPG owes me anything as an NN blogger or participant. If I were especially exercised about the lack of customization features here, I’d return to my old WordPress blog.
Regarding control of content, I’ve tried very hard to adhere to the guidelines, and to stick with largely original material on my blog here, and with topics related to environment, natural history, and scientific/academic culture. This does not mean, of course, that I think that my blog has any particular value for NPG or for anyone else; nevertheless, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to request a functional blogging and commenting platform that works at least as well as Ravelry (for example).
Aww, Kristi, I can say without the shadow of a doubt that your beautiful blog has a great deal of value to me. That’s not just a mutual-admiration-society sort of comment; it’s quite sincere. Your blog’s absolutely original, and a jewel in the NN blogging crown.
Not being a blogger here, I will simply comment from a reader/NN member’s perspective. I agree with RWintle that a high priority should be to improve server and database performance; I’ve found myself reading and commenting less these days, since the pages take so long to load.
This is not to disrespect or disparage the wonderful work done by Lou and Matt. They are always helpful, and they try to respond to specific questions as best as they can. But at times it does seem that they are the lone public faces of ‘management’, bravely guarding the entrance to some arcane establishment, within which clandestine operations are going on to determine the fate of the world…
Stay thee away from the Network Portal…for within…There be Dragons!
OK, case in point on ease of use: Tom says his NN blog is his first one. Haven’t seen it yet so I thought I’d pop over and see what he’s about.
Can’t find it. Explored Tom’s profile, but no blog.
Yes, it is incumbent upon Tom to provide certain information in his profile, but it should also be set at least as default on certain things. If I go to a Network member’s profile page and they are a Network Blogger then that should be glaringly obvious at the top of the page.
More on this topic can be found in the syllabus of the course I intend to teach this coming semester: How to drive traffic 101. Prerequisites, knowing what a browser is and 1337 sp3ak 101.
A browser? Isn’t that someone who spends an inordinate amount of time in a shop without buying anything?
@ Ian: I only recently noticed that my profile no longer included a link to my NN blog (shows you how much I pay attention to these things). I had to add the URL, as it seems to be an easy way to access the blog for new entries. Other parts of my profile (e.g. publications) seemed to import to the new platform just fine.
@ Heather: Thanks! Your kind comments are much appreciated, as always. I guess I just wanted to make the point that I don’t feel that I’m entitled to anything as a blogger here (and as an academic, I knows me some entitlement … Eru, the diva drama, from both XX and XY, that goes on at work every day!).
Ack! The mere act of signing in for commenting took 47 seconds… when the username and password are already saved and stored as a cookie!
One does get that feeling, Ian. The question is how to tame/train them?
Apropos to our conversation, this is a comment I just received via email from a colleague who blogs on a different platform (emphasis mine):
I’ve been watching the NN dust up in amusement and went to comment a couple of times before being bogged down in actually trying to comment and just gave up. Figured it was easier to do on my own blog, but I think you started a good thing there. If nothing else, making it easier to comment should be high on the list of shit to fix.
This person is tech savvy, a fairly prolific blogger and even s/he got put off by the log-in issues.
I had a very similar comment on a recent post of mine. It came from a leading light of the medical library world and a fellow blogger. He gave a talk about group blogging and I asked him what he thought about blogging platforms like NN. He was curious enough to check out my blog here and did fight through to leave a comment, but said:
One reason against using this nature platform is that I had to create a registration on the site to comment rather than being able to use my wordpress ID for example. This is a quite common convenience and helpful for keeping things linked together.
OTOH, the garden wall seems to be little defense against spamweeds. I’m sure I’m not the only one who received an invitation to join the network of “Ms. Gift”, Poison Spam Troll, recently. So what’s the point of the registration hurdles, ’zactly?
Kristi = nail + head
Ah – so nature.com will be tied up in the ‘Article Improvement Project’ until early 2011 (slide 15 here). And NN is indeed one big experiment, but maybe one that’s mostly left to run its course unattended (or unsupported). Under these circumstances, I wonder whether Nature Network is well placed under the ‘nature.com’ umbrella, if most efforts there are concentrated on ‘the future of science publishing’ with only few resources left to accommodate science communication (which may be a completely different kettle of fish).
Dan? In the absence of information, people will start drawing their own conclusions.
To think that a spambot made our point so very eloquently.
Lou, by the way, thank you, directly. 🙂 Have a good weekend.
All,
Thanks for your recent comments. I’m currently at a conference, so please forgive the patchy coverage in my responses.
Given the agreement between comments, I’ll try and address the topics rather than replying to each person, otherwise I’ll end up repeating myself (and getting confused :-). So please don’t take the topic-based approach personally.
Specific steps we are taking
– Most immediately, we are going to add an improved ability to format comments, as well as blogrolls and customisable headers (see blog post explaining more details). Lou will let you know when these are ready due to be released, which should be in the next couple of weeks but I’m reluctant to post a precise date and risk yet more unmet expectations.
– Performance issues: we know about these and are working to fix them. Nature.com is a high-traffic site, with a complicated set up of servers. We have recently moved NN onto a different part of our infrastructure precisely so we can try and fix the speed issues. Our recent figures – based on the independent monitoring service that we use – indicate that page load times have dropped significantly. We are addressing some MT4 issues which will help fix the speed of posting comments and we’re continuing to work on speed issues overall. Please bear with us.
– Other issues: all issues that you have reported in the feedback forums or by emailing Lou have been logged in our internal bug tracking systems and we have an internal list that we’re working through. Lou is doing a great job of closely supervising this and will continue to post updates on our progress with resolving issues, as well as emailing you about any specific individual issues you’ve let her know about. If you’d like to check the things that have been reported or suggest anything new, please do so in the feedback forum or by emailing Lou (l.woodley@nature.com).
Longer term plans
– We DO have some clear ideas about where we want to take NN, but as I’m sure you can appreciate some of these are commercially sensitive and we do not wish to reveal them in a public forum just yet. I CAN assure you that NN is something we are committed to. That said, we also have some unknowns, and options we’d like to discuss. We’d like your input, over and above the feedback you’ve already provided. The focus groups will give us a closed forum in which to do that and I reiterate the invitation to participate if you would like to be involved in helping us to shape the new developments. Again, Lou should be your point of contact for any feedback on this as she will have a key role in the internal discussions and implementation of our plans in her role as the Product Manager for all of our blogging activities.
– The links to websites and discussions are useful, but reading them reveals different and sometimes contradictory wishes. The future of science blogging in general is currently being debated. So we simply can’t get clear cut answers for the long term through desk research alone, and our focus groups will provide us an opportunity to discuss and debate the issues. Such is the nature of the rapidly-changing online ecosystem. It also means that we have to take an experimental approach.
The casual commenters issue
– This is something we discuss internally at length. I think we all know that there are pros and cons between quantity and quality. Our thinking is that we really want to maintain the quality of the discussion, and avoid (as much as we can) some of the aggression that can plague open fora in science and elsewhere. We’ve relaxed our policies to allow pseudonyms, but ultimately we think that asking people to register is appropriate as – to put it crudely – it is a filtering mechanism. I know it’s not foolproof, it may put some people off (and, yep, we don’t offer the slickest user experience yet). I think we should also consider that, even with no barriers to commenting, we may still find limited commenting activity and find the good old 90-9-1 Principle of participation inequality applies. So, on balance, we have decided that the key to growing traffic is to offer a high quality discussion, and this is the path we want to take for now. We do have some specific ideas about how we can promote blogs, encourage participation and make use of the Nature brand – all of which will help the profile of our bloggers – and these will form part of our focus group discussions.
I hope this post so far answers some questions. I’ll respond to the suggestion that an explanation as to why things take so long might be helpful in a separate post next week as I think this one’s already too long!
Best,
Dan
Hi Dan,
Thank you very much – I’ve seen the mockups and I’m looking forward to the coming changes with great enthusiasm. Anything that makes it easier to blog will have the effect of increasing both the quality and quantity of our posts, so the changes ahead will be beneficial to everyone.
I would just like to add that I hope that the decision to ban non-NN users from commenting is not a closed topic. I would still like to see this changed at some point in the future. (I firmly believe bloggers are responsible enough to take on the burden of moderating their own comment threads.)
cheers!
thanks for your reply, Dan. But I really think you should reconsider the barriers to commenting.
I’ve just put up a blog post about ecological niches, and I’d like ecologists to respond. Most won’t be on NN already, and by keeping this barrier up, you’re reducing the responses I’ll get. This makes it less likely I’ll get a conversation going, which is what I want. IOW, the barriers are making the quality worse because you’re making it harder for scientists to join in the conversation at NN.
my impression was that the purpose of NN was to encourage scientists online, in a forum that suits their needs. If you put a barrier up to their even starting to join the discussion, you’re doing it wrong.
The way to keep the quality of conversation going is to be a bit careful about your bloggers – make sure that they are thoughtful and (relatively) polite. that creates a milieu where the quality of the discussion is high, so people wanting to take part will do so at the that level. The occasional infestation of Pharynguloids can be contained by offering them watercress sandwiches.
Hello Dan,
Thanks for taking the time to reply, and it’s great to read about the progress on the other post.
However, I am still unsure why you want to set up these closed ‘focus groups’. We already have a private bloggers forum that provides a space where things can be discussed away from the public eye. This forum is accessible to all NN bloggers (instead of a small, self-selecting group), which means that you can tap into a very diverse range of opinions and input. Of course this does not mean that everyone will chime in on everything all the time, only that they can if they want to. Why not use the communication tools we have here on NN – wouldn’t that be appropriate to develop the platform further?
It seems to me that especially if NN is an ongoing experiment (and obviously a learning experience for NPG as well) and with the “science blogging ecosystem” evolving and all, you’d want to get as diverse a range of input as you can get to see where this is going?
Regards,
steffi
Many thanks for taking the time to respond Dan – I appreciate it is difficult to find the time when you are on the road.
I echo Bob’s hope that the decision on commenting policy is not closed and that the focus groups will be a genuine “opportunity to discuss and debate the issues”. I’d be grateful it you could clarify that. We are all interested here in making the blogs on Nature Network more visible and more appealing to a bigger audience – and in maintaining the quality of the discussion.
But that quality depends on the participants — not just on the ability of the blogger to raise interesting topics in a thoughtful way. If participation is limited by the network structure, that can degrade quality by restricting the range/number of participants. I’m not sure that is good for long-term health.
Moreover, the 90-9-1 principle is likely to remain but those numbers are not fixed in stone and I’ll wager they are affected by the ease of access to the comment thread. A switch to 90-8-2 would already be a 200% improvement! Registration, in my view, is too high a barrier. As Bob says, it is not the only way to avoid the aggression that crops up on comment threads.
Hello Dan, we’re at the same meeting, and I’m going to try and find you today, so you may have spoken to me before you read this. But the 90-9-1 principle applies in different ways. It’s been cited for Wikipedia as the difference between users just reading the site, making changes in an article, or starting their own (making bigger changes). However, you don’t need an account to edit Wikipedia: of the users editing articles, many do so anonymously. I know I do – I don’t want Wikipedia account just to correct minor facts or sentence structures once in a blue moon. If I would have needed an account to make those changes, I would never do so
Maybe your also referring to the reverse pyramid: 10% of users generate 90% of the content. So, fine, you only miss out on 10% of content by putting up a higher wall, but that’s still 90% of users.
I recommend that while you’re at your conference, you have a chat with Cameron Neylon and Michael Nielsen, and attend the Sunday AM session on blogging (in which I’m also participating, together with bloggers from four other science blog networks.)
Hello Dan, we’re at the same meeting, and I’m going to try and find you today,
LMAO, that sounds almost threatening!
Ha! I doubt he found me very threatening. (I’m tiny!)
Tardy followup – and thanks to all, for also following up.
Perhaps the filtering mechanism could be put into effect in a simpler manner, using similar mechanisms that work for other large blogging sites, and allowing people to tie in those simple offsite identities to their more complete Nature Network profiles should they choose to do so (and they would be greatly encouraged to)?
For instance, on a good number of serious blogs with no apparent trouble drowning in spam from the user end, I can log in using my own blogger profile (if I used Blogger, LiveJournal, or WordPress), AIM (shudder), Google ID information, or, best of all IMHO, OpenID. If I ever go back to comment having once done so, there’s the possibility of my computer storing a cookie – or not – so I don’t even have to log back in once I go back to comment again.
I received the following comment from a long-time reader, elsewhere, and it explained a lot for me. To add to the other anecdotes recounted earlier in the thread.
A shame, and if he has expressed himself thus, The 90-9-1 rule applies in the other direction, so imagine how many other worthwhile contributing commenters do the same?
Since I was one who complained about it, let me say for the record that as Dan says, NN pages are loading much more quickly than before. So thanks to the team (Lou? somebody else?) for that.