Writing Astronomy Articles: What It's Like to Have 60,000 People Read Your Stuff

In September 2006, I had a very strange experience. An article I wrote about vacuum energy made it on the front page of Digg. It was a silly article inspired by something I read on livescience.com

Coincidentally, ProBlogger was having a Group writing project designed to help young sites/blogs get noticed. I went ahead and submitted the article to the project. This was at about 1:00am.

I awoke the next day and around lunchtime checked the traffic to my site, I sat dumbfounded as my site had almost 30,000 views. By the end of the day 60,000 people had visited my site and read my little article. Someone, presumably a ProBlogger reader, had submitted the article to Digg.

The experience was a very strange one. My email was overflowing with comments from my Contact Page. The comments ranged from a very heartfelt “Thanks for the site” to outright attacks on me, my family, sexual orientation and religious ideology.

I responded to as many of the positive emails as I had time for and deleted the attacks. Next, I went to Digg and read the comments people were leaving about the article.

Without a doubt, that was the best part of this experience. People were leaving some hilarious comm article. Since it was designed to be humorous, I was gratified to see how many people appreciated the humor.

Here is a sample (here is the link to the actual comments on Digg):

Great, now I won’t be able to carry coffee cans OR pictures of Angelina Jolie onboard planes!

Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
I think so Brain, but where are we going to find a monkey in a tu-tu at this hour?

Tried this, didn’t work. Obviously subatomic matter/anti-matter particles are gay. Really, who didn’t already know this?

And it goes on. Of course, there were trolls:

wait, what the fuck did i just waste my time reading?
Response:I don’t know but you also waste Dugg down for being waaaay to geeky. I mean, if we are talking science faction here, then lets start talking about quantum me Response: I am guessing you are WAAAAY new to Digg. Geek is the core tenant of this site.

What in the hell, that was about the lamest thing I’ve read all year, and it’s gotten this many Digg’s and attention in the comments? And anyone who says other than it’s just knee slapping hilarious is given a thumbs down? I guess this is mob mentality at it’s finest, Web 2.0 indeeeed. I think that’s the bigger story here. How mob mentality of Web 2.0 sites can make even the dumbest stories seem like the second coming. Was it written by Kevin Rose or something, I just don’t see why people actually found this interesting at all.

This experience was the first one I’ve had where I’ve actually had an audience of appreciable size and at first I wasn’t so sure I liked it. I mean, when I started this website, I did it with the expectation that at least SOME people would read it and I even hoped that at some point, a LOT of people would read it.

I don’t think I fully appreciated what that meant though. Having a large audience reading your work is an extremely humbling experience. Being on the front page of Digg put me out there in ways I wasn’t prepared for. It also illustrated (at least to me) the responsibility of a website content provider.

As a writer-of-astronomy-articles, I feel a strong need to make sure what I write is accurate and honest. I w if I had content out there being read and linked to by thousands, AND have it be wrong. But that’s just me. I realize there is a lot of information posted everyday on the internet that is wrong, misleading, mean-spiritied, and hate-filled. That stuff just comes with the territory of interacting in an open medium like the internet: anybody can contribute, and (sometimes unfortunately) anybody does.

I have a choice though, about the content I put on the internet and I’ve decided to make it as accurate and entertaining as I can, even if it really pisses people off. I’ve been working real hard at trying to bring something that you can’t find at too many other websites. I have no plans to write about typical astronomical events, like the Leonid meteor shower or the Transit of Mercury or anything else that has to do with astronomy unless there is something truly different I can bring to the discussion.

I feel it’s a waste of my time to put information out there that someone else has already written, in many cases better than I could have. Besides, I’m not interested in just writing about what’s up tonight or NASA’s latest new mission or why pluto isn’t a planet anymore. That is, unless I can also bring some perspective to bear on it that someone else hasn’t already, or at least not in the same way I can.

There are many, many people writing about what's up tonight, the latest NASA news, etc and it is incredibly redundant. When NASA puts out a press release, I can watch it propogate through my BlogLines news reader like a wave. Everybody is blogging about the same stuff, in some cases over and over again. There is no shortage of basic information and news about astronomy. People write about it because it's easy and it's what they know. There is an audience for it, I just don't think it is large enough to justify the number of sites dedicated to it.

All of the low-hanging fruit is gone with respect to gaining an internet audience. If you’re just starting a blog or website, then you’d better have something to say that hasn’t been said a million different times in a million different ways by a million different bloggers. Gone are the days when people can just put up a website and get an automatic audience.

I’ve come to believe (after the Digg experience) that in order to build a highly-trafficked website, a site that is visited by thousands of visitors per day, one must stay true to who you are and what you are passionate about. Further, whatever your site theme is, you should try to write it in a manner that appeals to people who stumble onto your site that may not necessarily be interested in it. So, even though there are thousands of sites on astronomy, many writing essentially the same thing, no one is going to find the perspective and interpretation of that stuff that they find here.

And I want to make damn sure they don't laugh as much at those sites as they do here.

If you want a website consistently visited by thousands of people per day, you’re going to need to be ‘one charming mother-f**king pig’ (Jules from Pulp Fiction). Entertaining, interesting writing coupled with your life’s unique perspective is a pretty good recipe for gaining a wide audience. If you can't be entertaining, then you'd need to have access to information that no one else does. Since I'm not an insider or privvy to anything, I went the entertaining route.

The only way to provide truly unique content on the web today, is to present your passion (whatever it is) through the lens of your life and experiences. No one has led the life you have, made the choices you’ve made, or done the things you’ve done. Not exactly. Presenting what matters to you in the context of who you are and the life you’ve led is a truly unique thing in the universe.

And the great thing is, only you possess it! Unless you've lived the life of an automaton, your experiences are one of the only real sources of originality left. It has real value. I also think there is a guaranteed audience that wants to read about it.

The only variable is the size of the audience your unique perspective can attract. In my opinion, the size of your eventual audience is detemined by two things: luck (such as getting on the front page of Digg) and your voice. How you write or otherwise present your passion and experiences can have a great influence on how appealing it is to a large number of people. I believe a big component is to make your content entertaining as well as informative, but of course that’s not the only way, it’s is just the method I decided to adopt.

But beware: you’ll need a thick skin because you are going to be attacked. That’s the part I was least prepared for and that surprised me so much. I wasn’t ready for the attacks that resulted from so many people reading one article.

Just from the distribution of personalities that converge on your work, the wide spectrum from happy to sad to mad people out there, coupled with whatever mood they happen to be in when they read your article or watch your video, some number of negative responses are inevitable. It’s just something that happens when a lot of people come together and experience something. I just never thought about it and I never expected so many to read one of my articles. Be careful what you wish for, I guess.

The same thing happened when I made the Hubble Deep Field video. People who left comments on YouTube either really loved it or they despised it, there didn't seem to be a lot of middle ground. There were a lot of comments on either side of the spectrum, extreme comments. Again, all aspects of my life were attacked for producing this content.

Since this experience, I’ve read about popular video bloggers, such as one named Emily on YouT worn down from the attention and from personal attacks and decided to just stop. I can hardly blame them, it’s a lot to go through just because you decided to put up an article or video.

So I’ve recently comes to terms with all of this and decided that this website and the videos I’ve created really matter to me – so much so that I’m willing to put up with the bad to reach the people who genuinely appreciate what I’m doing.

This discovery was a very important one. It has become a critical yardstick that helps me when trying to determine if I’m doing something I truly love.

The fact that I’m willing to go ahead even though I may be relentlessly attacked when something becomes popular, is a signal to me that this is a worthwhile activity. It is a sign that I’m creating a life aligned with my life’s purpose and it’s the strongest gauge I’ve found so far to help me decide if I’m on the right track. After all, who else but a passionate person wants to keep doing something in the face of all the bad attention?

For years, this has been a huge issue for me. It is incredibly important that I build a life that makes a difference, a life that matters. The problem for me has always been finding those things that are truly worthwhile in my life. Finding the things that matter.

Recently, I left working in the sciences after ten years because it wasn’t as fulfilling as I’d always imagined a life of science to be. Working in the field, I discovered that many astronomers (and scientists in general) are more concerned with keeping their funding than finding out things, of damaging a person’s reputation if they are in competition with them, of keeping their jobs. This was not how I thought it was going to be and I became very disillusioned.

What I thought was my life’s passion, working as an astronomer, wasn’t as fulfilling as I’d hoped. As I began to search for ways to live a life that mattered, the idea for this website became more prominent in my thoughts. I’ve re-thought (just a little) my idea of a fulfilling life and have concluded that I can still live a life filled with discovery and science and in addition, I can share that with others.

That component, sharing with others, was (I think) the missing component in my life. Sure, I could live my life staring through an eyepiece and writing papers and staying cloistered behind NASA and NSF funding, struggling with other astronomers for attention and political favor. But when I asked myself what I would take from a lifetime of such pursuits, the answer came back to me that whatever it was, it wouldn’t be a greater understanding of the universe as much as a greater understanding of science funding and politics.

By starting this website, I’ve been able to explore what matters to me and share it with more people than I could ever have hoped in such a short time. All the while doing it in my own way using my own unique perspective; I would recommend it in a heartbeat. While my experience with being on th Digg front page was shocking, it was also exhilarating, fun and helped teach me a little more about what is important to me.

And I wouldn’t have traded any of it for the world, attacks and all. I know I’m on the right track to living a life that matters.

If, after reading this, some of you think you might be up to the challenge, I highly recommend this company to get you started. The aforementioned link IS an affiliate link. I may get some money if you decide to start a website with them. I feel completely comfortable recommending them to anyone interested in an effortless way to start a website and have it get maximum exposure in a short time.

And I fully endorse getting onto the front page of Digg as many times as you possibly can.

See you in the funny papers…