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June 16, 2006
How to blog scientific research?
As someone who does scientific research, I haven't figured out how blogging fits into my investigations. I'm an experimental psychologist. That means I run controlled experiments, gather data, and analyze the results using statistical methods.
The scientific tradition says you don't publish your findings without first having peers review your work to say, "Yep, this looks good." The review process filters what goes from scientists to the rest of the world. And that's a good thing.
Today the Internet -- especially blogging -- makes this tradition seem old and slow. Why wait three years for your study to be reviewed and printed when you can share the key findings in three minutes?
For example, my Stanford lab recently completed an experiment investigating one way to increase use of a mobile phone application. The data show that a simple manipulation we made motivates people to use the app almost twice as much. Pretty cool. But here's the problem: If we go through peer review, people won't learn about our research until spring 2007, ten months from now. If you're studying technology, that's a long time to wait.
I've grappled with this issue since we started our large-scale research on web credibility in 1998. I still don't know the best path forward. This problem is more pressing now that my lab is researching persuasion via mobile phones, an area that's developing quickly.
-- BJ Fogg
Posted by BJ Fogg at June 16, 2006 06:33 AM