The Endless Frontier

I went to the launch party for Nature Network Boston last night at the Museum of Science. When you throw a party around the idea of combining the Internet, blogging, and science, you would expect the guest list to consist exclusively of nerdy guys. While there were plenty of us, there were also plenty of non-nerdy-looking girls. Some were, dare I say, hot. My suspicion is that they were biologists.

In launching the site, Nature wants to try to build a “community” of scientists in the Boston area who will interact on the Web. Blogging and employment-related interaction are the most talked about activities. If the idea works, Nature plans to roll out the program to other cities.

And that’s the big question: will this site sink or float? Establishing an online community is a tough thing to do. Let me give you two examples from the sidebar over on the right. Radiogodsforum.com was a site started in 2002 by fans of the Don and Mike radio show. At the time, I was a rabid listener and stumbled across the forum while surfing the Internet. In the beginning, there might have been 5-10 of us who posted regularly, despite the fact that the show had something like 6 million listeners. Over the course of time, the site grew in popularity and more people visited and participated. Now there are 3000 registered members, with 329 as the maximum who’ve visited the site in one day. The posting, in my opinion, is mostly limited to a “core” of 20 or so users. Thus, out of a total audience of 6 million or so, you have 20 people “interacting.” The rest are mainly voyeurs.

The other example is FairfaxUnderground. This forum site is relatively new and was established as a place for people in Fairfax County, VA (an affluent suburb of Washington, DC) to come and discuss anything of local interest. I think that’s a great idea and I’m surprised by the fact that only 10 or so people regularly post to the forum. From what I understand, most of the hits that the site generates are from people who want to search the arrest & tickets database (a really cool feature). The conversation in the forums is limited and I don’t think much of a “community” has been formed in this case. It’s more like guys hanging out on the corner busting each others’ chops.

So, creating a vibrant online community is hard. If you look at what Nature wants to do–create an online community of scientists in Boston–it seems like a bit of an uphill battle. This said, I’m definitely pulling for the site to work. One of the people who spoke at tonight’s shindig said that users should submit suggestions and feedback. I’ve got plenty, but I’ll save that for a later post. In the meantime, everyone give NNB a look.

And thanks for the invite, Nature. It was great seeing Josh from Sceptical Chymist, and it would’ve been nice if there was more time for general interaction. I never ended up finding anyone who planned on starting a NNB blog, but if we’re lucky, maybe some of those biologists will.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 7th, 2006 at 2:44 am and is filed under Science, Boston, Blogs. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will appear immediately, but I reserve the right to delete inappropriate comments.