Skeptical Blogging 101
The following is my short presentation at the Vancouver Skepticamp on March 28, 2009 on skeptical blogging and getting the message of science, criticial thinking, and reason in the public eye. Following this I’ll explain how to set up your own blog and provide a few tips on how to get people to read it.
In Richard Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins coined the term “meme” to represent “an element of culturual ideas, symbols or practices that gets transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena.”
The actual existence of “memes” as distinct units hasn’t been proven, but there’s no denying that some ideas can spread, successfully, while others do not.
Similar to natural selection in biology, memes compete to survive. This competition is not something I’m qualified to talk about in-depth, but one part of success in that is certainly reproduction. It doesn’t matter how strong your meme is, if it doesn’t reproduce it will die out.
If we want skepticism and critical thinking to survive it has to reproduce. It has to spread to more people.
You’d think with the strength of the scientific method and critical thinking that this would be easy. We live in an age of marvels where we live twice as long on average as our great great grandparents. I’m carrying a tiny computer that can play 5,000 songs and almost instantly access information on almost any subject. With my tiny cell phone I can communicate with a friend on the other side of the planet. Genetically modified foods have saved over a billion people from starvation. The list goes on.
But despite all this, critical thinking and reason is struggling in the public arena.
Why? We certainly have opponents who are organized and experienced in the religious right and “woo” camps. But they’re wrong, and proven so time and again. Still we don’t get much traction. Why?
Skeptical concepts are hard to spread in traditional media and this can be summed up with the phrase — “News doesn’t run the story of the truck that didn’t explode.” You only have to compare the number of stories about the “bigfoot body found!” last year to the number that pointed out it was a hoax to see this in action.
But the Internet is changing this. The number of stories about a subject are becoming less important than the number of people linking to them, commenting on them, sharing them.
With the Internet you can help spread critical thinking and skepticism, and it’s easier now with social networking and the subject of my talk here — blogs. You don’t have to be at the forefront of “skeptical blogs”, in competition for readers with Pharyngula or Bad Astronomy. A personal blog with occasional links to skeptical debunking of “woo” or “Anti-vaxx” propaganda is all it takes.
In fact, it can be stronger in ways than the full-fledged skeptical blog. Non-skeptics generally don’t read those sites. But those same non-skeptics are friends and family of skeptics and will read your blog to know how you’re doing, see pictures of the new baby, what videogames you’re playing, or just to hear what you thought about the latest superhero movie adaptation. And when they do, they can be casually introduced to skeptical concepts and skeptical stories they might be interested in.
So how do you make a blog?
It’s easy!
Here’s the how-to that I would have done a demonstration of had we not been over time.
For both personal and business use I rely on a piece of open-source software called WordPress. In over a decade of web design and blogging I’ve tried multiple types of “Content Management Systems” and WordPress comes out on top in almost every category. It’s free, easy to use, powerful, secure, incredibly extensible with its “plugin” system, and has minimal system requirements:
- PHP 4.3 or greater
- MySQL 4.0 or greater
- The mod_rewrite Apache module
Most web hosting services easily meet these requirements, even free ones.
The simplest way to get a WordPress blog is through WordPress’ own free-blogging site, WordPress.com. Much like other sites like Livejournal, Blogger or Typepad, WordPress.com offers free hosting and setup for your own blog. To sign up simply go to http://wordpress.com/ and click the big “Sign Up Now!” button.
Note that your username will also determine the URL to your weblog, so if you choose “vancouverskeptic” as your username the URL to your blog will be “http://vancouverskeptic.wordpress.com/”. Because of this you should try to choose something memorable and easily communicated verbally.
WordPress also offers Premium Features, including your own domain name for only $15/year. This means you can get a much more personalized and easy-to-remember URL to your blog and I’d strongly suggest it for everyone.
Here I was going to note using Webhosting services to host your blog with the added benefit of more control including email but I just found out that WordPress offers the ability to use the Google Apps for Domains for any account that bought the “Domain Mapping Upgrade” (your own domain name for your blog). This means you can use the excellent Gmail interface to handle the email accounts on your domain at no extra cost (above the Domain Mapping cost, of course). So for $15 per YEAR, WordPress is offering blogging with your own domain with the best blogging software available, on your own domain, with the best Email application available. I recently switched my web design business’ email system over to Google Apps for Domains and I’m thrilled with its accessibility and power. I’m no longer tied down to the one computer running my email software.
So I’m just going to leave out the webhosting option because for people who will just be blogging it’s an unnecessary expense!
Summary
- Go to WordPress.com and sign up for a blog.
- (Optional) Pick an easy-to-remember and easy-to-communicate domain name for your blog and pay the $15 yearly fee.
- Blog about things that interest you, including skeptical topics.
- Tell your friends and family that you’re blogging!
That’s all it takes! And while just one skeptical person with a blog isn’t going to make a big difference, thousands of skeptical people with blogs will make an enormous difference. I’ll go into more detail on how this works later, as well as some WordPress usage hints!
If you have any questions about WordPress or blogging, feel free to email me at puck@holycow.com.
My own blog is located at http://www.holycow.com/joe/
