Have you noticed that we are on the cusp of our 1000th member at the Nature Blog Network? That’s a whole bushel of nature blogs! Yet the achievement doesn’t quite feel honest, considering that roughly a quarter of our members haven’t even installed the NBN badge.
At the same time, the recent discussions we’ve had about recalibrating blog categories got us thinking about ways to make this network more beneficial to nature bloggers along with the readers that love them. So we’ve made some changes. Now you may need to as well…
Please note the significant segmentation in the category structure of the Nature Blog Network. Essentially, we’ve added a number of important new descriptive categories. Every member should review these new categories and select the one that best represents his or her blog. Obviously no member’s work can be described in a single word. Naturalists are naturally curious about all aspects of their surroundings. But even though we write about all manner of organisms on 10,000 Birds, we are still first and foremost a bird blog.
The catch-all category has been changed from Ecosystem to Natural History. If you’d like to remain in that category, you’re all set. But I strongly suggest you consider some of the following more specific categories; not only are you more likely to attract readers interested in your particular flavor of nature blogging, but it’s much easier to stand out in a crowd of 40 than one of 400!
Everyone has one month to recategorize and make sure you’ve installed the tracking code you each received when you were accepted to the NBN. On August 1, we will delete from the rolls any blog that still hasn’t installed the code. That’s the stick. The carrot, by which I mean further benefits we’ll be rolling out to Nature Blog Network members in good standing, will be explained very soon. Until then, please consider these categories (and expect a copy of this post in your e-mail box too!)
Most of the following categories are self-explanatory. The ones that are not are followed by explanation:
Academic - This is the nature science category. If you are a scientist with a blog that is heavier on science than nature, you probably belong in this category.
Art
Backyard - This is the option for blogs focused mostly on backyard fauna or local patches.
Birds
Conservation - only habitat or wildlife conservation blogs need apply. Green blogs have their own networks.
Desert
Education - nature ed blogs
Flora - NOT gardening blogs
Forest
Freshwater - encompasses lakes, rivers, wetlands, etc.
Fungi
Grasslands
Hiking & Outdoors - the category for hikers, climbers, kayakers, and other active enthusiasts
Insects & Invertebrates
Mammals
Marine
Mollusks
Montane
Natural History - the new generalist category
Organization - for blogs maintained by non-profits and other organizations
Photography
Reptiles & Amphibians
Rocks & Minerals
Spirituality - exploring faith or a belief system through nature
Tour Operator
Tundra - arctic and antarctic
Writing
With special categories for nature art, photography, writing, academic, education, and conservation blogs along with top-level headings for all the world’s biomes, we’ve got a place for every species of nature blogger. If you have comments to share, we’d love to hear them. Also, as you log into the user panel to adjust your category, please keep in mind that the form is case sensitive. If you don’t remember your password, you can contact us with your username and the password you’d like to use from now on. But please try to figure out your password on your own… with nearly 1000 members, this might be a long month!
18 Comments
Writing? Could you expound?
While we’re all obviously nature writers here, April, we see Writing as the category for those bloggers who emphasize creative writing, poetry, literature, and the like on their sites.
Woohoo! I’m now #1 in my category. Of course, I’m also last. Is the glass half full or half empty?
Nice work!
You guys really need to kick out a few of the big hitters - some in the top 10 never, or hardly ever, blog about ‘nature’ at all. I am looking in particular at Greg Laden. People who only post about nature one in every 20 articles, or even one in every 10, do not warrant a place here - have you guys considered implementing a sort of policy about that? It’s not fair on those of us who DO blog about nature all the time.
Thanks! This is great.
I *wish* to be removed from these “rolls.”
I moved my blog from Typepad to Wordpress nearly a year ago, and never got any sort of reminder to update information here (same e-mail, different URL).
Obviously there is no housekeeping going on for broken links.
Also, I happen to know there is a “high ranking” blog on the “toplist” of this site that hasn’t been updated since NOVEMBER 2008.
Maybe the “achievement doesn’t feel quite real” because a lot of the blogs aren’t in working order any more.
Gotta wonder about that ‘nearly 1000′ members claim as a result.
And by the way, using a gmail account to send notifications is a guarantee a lot of people will not receive the mail. The notice I got went directly into the spam folder of the e-mail account I registered with, and I had not previously set up any filters associated with gmail.
Firefly - sorry this isn’t working for you. To leave the network, just remove the NBN badge from your blog and we’ll remove you automatically. Or use the contact form to send us your NBN username and we’ll expedite that change.
I understand what you’re saying about wanting a reminder to update URLs when they change. Unfortunately, there’s no way to automate many of the processes such as updating member records or link checking. We wish there were! But I’m afraid that and other tasks will have to be managed by members themselves for now.
As for link checking - that’s what we’re doing now.
Morning Mike
Thanks for the email. I have read it a few times to make sure I full understand what is about to happen. What I’m not clear about is how I change my catagory. I’m currently in birds and from our past discussions we both were torn between photography and Ecosystem. My blog represents both. But in my heart I feel that Ecosytem is what I’m all about. I can change this information myself…just need a wee bit more information to figure it all out. Oh and the meaning of NBN in my mind is your link picture to your blog right?
Crista
Dear NBN folks - goes to show you that no good deed goes unpunished! I thank you for your volunteer efforts in developing and running a free NBN - my participation here has resulted in many referals to my sites. I’ve learned about carnivals from you, and participated in a couple. I’ve found other interesting nature sites to review, made new friends, and learned new things (including, thanks to Mike, how to update my blog links myself). As I do on other sites that have a link to my blogs, I exercise the link weekly to ensure it is still working. Especially after the Google issues with forwarding, this is a good idea. Meanwhile, upward and onward with NBN, and thanks.
Marge, thank you so much. I’m sure that Mike, Nate, and Seabrooke would agree with me that this is a labor of love.
It’s nice to hear that you are getting a tangible benefit from participating. We’ll do better as a group as each of our blogs does better individually.
This is a great site - for me, mostly because of the blog. But thanks for introducing new categories to the toplist as well. That might really help it become a useful directory. The weeding sounds like an excellent idea as well. I don’t know what to suggest about people who don’t post about nature very often; I didn’t enroll my main blog, Via Negativa, because I knew I only blogged about nature there maybe a tenth of the time. In a toplist, it just wouldn’t seem fair to those who have less traffic in part because of their very dedication to niche-blogging on a topic as non-sexy as nature.
Firefly, did we catch you on a bad day?
Nature blogger, I hear what you’re saying but it’s challenging to identify who is and isn’t a nature blogger.
Crista, I’m not quite sure what you’re asking!
Thanks to everyone else for the positive comments and feedback. It’s gratifying to know that many of you value our community and are working with us to make it more useful and engaging.
Nature blogger (and others)
I feel your pain. I blog on the same network as PZ Myers who’s blog gets as many hit as the rest of us put together.
I do not accept that there is one way to measure or characterize a blog. I write more nature posts than most nature bloggers. But since I post six to 12 items a day, the fact that I write 3 to 12 nature posts a week (depending on how many one defines as ‘nature’) is lost on the casual observer.
On the other hand, it is true that percentage wise, nature blogging is only part of what I do. So the complaint that I should not be considered as a nature blogger is totally valid from one perspective, and absolutely invalid from the other.
(Unless we say that one can only blog about nature to be a nature blogger, which I’m somewhat uncomfortable with. For one thing, if that logic was widely applied, bloggers who ’specialize in diversity’ would not really be allowed on the internet.)
When I look at the top 10 posts listed I see a lot of blogs that are not really nature blogs by your definition but that are blogging about nature but happen to have a lot of hits. This suppresses the blogs that are more focused on nature blogging.
One solution is that me, Tetrapod Zoology, etc. simply get off the Nature Blog Network. But the down side to that is that the nature blog badge is seen much more widely because relatively high volume blogs carry it.
I have two very general suggestions.
1) The beauty contest style listing, which simply ranks people by hits, gets majorly adjusted. What is the point of this network??? Is it to highlight a diversity of nature blogs? To help define nature blogging? To get conversations going? Redefine how the front page works. Make the process more editorial and community oriented instead of just hit oriented. This way people like Nature Blogger do not have to feel resentful of blogs that happen to have high hit rates (perhaps for reasons other than their nature blogging) and people like me can feel comfortable here. (I certainly do not feel comfortable with people suggesting that leave, and I also don’t feel comfortable always being in the top five or so knowing that the reason I”m in the top five is because of my Congo blogging or my Linux blogging or my Skeptics blogging)
2) Tell us large volume bloggers what to do to leverage our exposure for the direct benefit of this network.
These are obviously not exclusive ideas.
Mike,
I was asking if it was up to us to re-categorize our own blog to match the new changes. If that is so how do we re-categoize our blog? I was also clarifying the NBN symbol to make sure I knew that I have it posted onto my blog. Sorry I wasn’t very clear earlier today
Thank y’all for your continuing work and improvements.
Building on Greg’s very helpful response, I wonder if at some point it might be possible to find a way to reach out to more general bloggers? I realize that this is the Nature Blog Network and not the Nature Blogging Network, and obviously the carnivals, which y’all do a great job of highlighting, already do provide one avenue for those with an interest in nature to find each other. I don’t have a specific suggestion here, either, just a general observation that bloggers should be wary of ghettoizing themselves. One reason I don’t just blog about nature all the time is because I want to reach a more general, literary and secular humanist audience, and slowly convert readers to a greater appreciation of nature. As one anecdotal measure of my success, two of my readers told me they’d bought subscriptions to Orion magazine ths year, one of whom used to be quite hostile toward environmentalism, and at least six different people have bought books by a nature-poet friend, Todd Davis, as a result of my featuring him on my blog.
Again, I’m not suggesting that the NBN toplist be opened up to more general blogs that happen to focus on nature once and a while (though perhaps you could clarify how many posts/week ought to focus on nature for a blog to qualify?). I’m just saying that, as time goes on, you might think of more ways to include and involve such bloggers — maybe simply by increasing the visibility of this blog.
Great comments, everyone - thank you. We’re continuing to have those discussions and are open to the idea that the NBN may evolve over time as the community itself changes.
Greg, I wouldn’t let the opinion of one segment of members drive you out. That being said, I agree that the “ranking” promotes competition. The algorithm (as I understand it, and Mike can certainly jump in and clarify or correct) counts hits on the blog not readership or followers. One really good post or picture of wide interest can skew the stats, but any method we used would distort the stats in some way.
I appreciate your offer to explore how you can leverage your readership to the benefit of the network. That’s a good conversation for us to have.
Crista - I took a look at your blog, and you do have the logo and link installed so you’re good. You do need to change the category yourself.
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[...] As Mike posted in July, we’re going to delete blogs from the network which don’t show the NBN badge. New members will have two weeks after joining to add the badge. We’re in the process now of going through the list and verifying everyone is showing the network colors, that the links are good, and that there’s still a nature blog at the other end of the URL. We’re finding some duplicate entries and removing those as well. This is still in progress–I think about half of the inactive blogs have been removed at this point, the rest are still being reviewed. [...]