Two thoughts on blogging: thought archives, and bullets dodged

Brian Engh made this and posted it to FaceBook, writing, “Apropos of nothing here’s Mathew Wedel annihilating borderline parasitic theropods with the Bronto-Ischium of Eternal Retribution — a mythic energy weapon/sacred dinosaur ass-bone discovered by Uncle Jim Kirkland, now stored in Julia McHugh’s lair at Dinosaur Journey Fruita CO.”

I haven’t blogged about blogging in a while. Maybe because blogging already feels distinctly old-fashioned in the broader culture. A lot of the active discussion migrated away a long time ago, to Facebook and Twitter, and then to other social media outlets as each one in turn goes over the enshittification event horizon.

But I continue to think that if you’re an academic, it’s incredibly useful have a blog. I’ve thought this basically forever, but my reasons have changed over time. At first I only thought of a blog as a way to reach others — SV-POW! is a nice soapbox to stand on, occasionally, and it funnels attention toward our papers, which is always nice. Over time I came to realize that a huge part of the value of SV-POW! is as a venue for Mike and me to bat ideas around in. It’s basically our paleo playpen and idea incubator (I wrote a bit about this in my 2018 wrap-up post — already semi-ancient by digital standards!).

More recently I’ve come to realize another part of the value of SV-POW! to me, apart from anyone else on the planet: it’s an archive for my thoughts. If I want to find out what I was thinking about 10 or 15 years ago, I can just go look. And at this point, there is far too much stuff on SV-POW! for either Mike or me to remember it, so we regularly rediscover interesting and occasionally promising observations and ideas while trawling through our own archives.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from Nick Czaplewski, who was a curator at OMNH when I was starting out and for many years thereafter. He told me that you end up writing papers not only to your colleagues but also to your future self, because there’s no way you’re going to remember all the work you’ve done, all the ideas you’ve had, all the hypotheses you’ve tested, and so your published output is going to become a sort of external memory store for your future self. I’ve always found that to be true, and it’s even more true of SV-POW! than it is for any one of my papers, because SV-POW! is vast and ever-evolving.

Created by Stanley Wankel, also from Facebook.

I’ll preface what comes next by acknowledging that I’m speaking from a place of privilege (and not just because I have friends with image-editing software and senses of humor). Broadly, because I’m a cis-het white dude who had a fairly ridiculous string of opportunities come his way (like these and these), but also narrowly in that I’m not trying to make a name for myself right now. I have the freedom to not engage with social media. I never got on Twitter (bullet dodged), and I don’t plan on joining any of the Twitter-alikes (my life is already full, and I already struggle enough with online attention capture). I’m only on Facebook to keep in touch with a few folks I can’t easily reach otherwise, and to promote papers when they come out (because I want to, not because I feel any pressure to). And, frankly, at this point I expect every social media outlet to decay, so my motivation to invest in whatever’s next is minimal.

So, while I’m a definite social media skeptic at this point, I’m alert to the fact that people just coming into the field may want or even need to engage on the new platforms, because they don’t have the option of starting a reasonably popular paleo blog in 2007. But I still think it’s useful to have a blog, precisely because social media platforms decay, and because the conversations that happen on them are so ephemeral. Theoretically you could go back and see what you were saying on Twitter or Facebook 10 years ago, but they don’t make it easy, and why would you? (And good luck doing the same with Google Plus.) So I think if I was starting out at this point, I’d still have a blog, and every time I wrote something substantial or at least interesting on the platform du jour, I’d copy and paste it into a blog post. It might reach a few more folks, or different ones; it might start different conversations; but minimally it would be a way to record my thoughts for my own future self.

I’m curious if anyone else finds that reasoning compelling. It will be interesting to come back in 10 years and see if I still think the same. At least when that time comes, I’ll know where to come to find out what I was thinking in late 2023, and I’ll be able to (provided WordPress doesn’t mysteriously fail between now and then).

My other thought for the day is that SV-POW! has survived in part by dodging a few specific bullets. The first was exhaustion — after blogging weekly for over two years, we decided that we wouldn’t even attempt a weekly schedule anymore, and just blog when we felt like it (2018 was, by intention, an odd year out, and we haven’t repeated that experiment). The second was over-specialization. For the first couple of years we worked a sauropod vertebra into just about every post, and if we blogged about something off-topic, we flagged it as such. Over time the blog evolved into “Mike and Matt yap about stuff”, like how to make your own anatomical preparations, and — most notably — open-access publishing and science communication. I think that’s been crucial for the blog’s survival — Mike and I both chafe at restrictions, even ones we set for ourselves, and it’s nice to able to fire up a WordPress draft and just let the thoughts spill out, whether they have to do with sauropods or not.

Another Stanley Wankel creation. Gareth Monger commented that the band name was ZooZoo Tet, which is instantly, totally, unimpeachably correct.

A third bullet, which I’d nearly forgotten about, was blog-network capture. As I was going back through my Gmail archive (my other digital thought receptacle) in search of the origins of the “Morrison bites” paper (see last post), I ran into discussions with Darren with about Tetrapod Zoology moving from ScienceBlogs to the Scientific American Blog Network. I had completely forgotten that back when the big professional science-blogging networks were a thing, I had a secret longing that SV-POW! would be invited. But they all either imploded (ScienceBlogs) or became fatally reader-unfriendly (SciAm, at least for TetZoo*), and now I look back and think “Holy crap I’m glad we were never asked.” Because even if those networks didn’t implode or enshittify, they’d have wanted us to blog on time and on topic, and both of those things would have killed SV-POW!

*If you are on SciAm, or read any of their blogs, and like them: great. I’m glad it’s working out for you. It didn’t for the only SciAm blog I cared about.

So really both my points are sides of a single coin: have a digital space of your own to keep your thoughts, even if only for your future self, and don’t tie that space to anything more demanding or ephemeral than a website-hosting service.