I'm getting seriously spammed on my blog AND with comments I apparently made on other peoples' blogs. I didn't do it, honest M'lud.#mscedc
— Eli's inane rambling (@Eli_App_D) January 30, 2017
One of the downsides of having a public facing website which offers the ability to contact the author is of course spam. We all at some point get spammed but a question was raised by Myles this week about how to deal with this contact from outside the course. He is in a unique position of having non-spammers contact him, people who are actually interested in what he is writing.
Blogging in academia is a relatively new thing which involves a very different writing style and interaction with your reader. Whereas previously in academia contact was generally amongst peers through academic writing, journals etc, blogging and the informal style of it has opened academic research to a much wider audience, and blogging academics now need to learn to write in this informal style and to communicate with readers who may not be as well read in the field. Of course, this informality also opens the blogger to a new experience, one which can be worrying at first for a new academic blogger, comments.
I had the pleasure of supporting an academic colleague with his first adventure into blogging at the time when one of his blog posts went viral causing a whole heap of attention he hadn’t expected or prepared for and comments from readers almost put him off blogging for life. Not because he was upset that someone was saying something negative, but he was trying to treat comments as a personal conversation that he had to reply to. One comment on his blog post led to a conversation where other readers commented on the comment, back and forth, with the blog author feeling he had to reply every time someone added to the conversation. To help, I contextualised the experience for him in an easy to understand format. Your blog posts are like a lecture after the lecture people will sometimes approach you with questions which you can answer. Sometimes others join in and a conversation will start. You don’t have to stay in the lecture theatre until the conversation has ended. You can leave and let the audience members carry on their conversation by themselves. this is how you treat conversations which happen within the comment son your blog post, sometimes readers will chat to each other, you don’t have to be a part of that, it’s ok to leave them to it.
In the end, I wrote up some simple guidance notes to help academics who wanted to move into blogging so in the spirit of the public blog, please feel free to read, use, and reshare for anyone who may find them useful.
