Clive Thompson started his blog, Collision Detection, in September 2002, as he was beginning his year as a Knight Fellow. Four years later, Collision Detection has become one of the most well-regarded blogs on technology and culture.
In an interview with Martha Henry, Acting Director of the Fellowships, Thompson talks about why he started his blog, how it's changed over the years, and how it's helped his career as a journalist.
Martha Henry: Why is your blog named Collision Detection?
Clive Thompson: I was looking for a cute name and I knew that blogs that had their own domain names seem more respectable in some way, because they look like an entity. If you’re just some Random Guy at BlogSpot.com, it’s a little less authoritative. "Collision detection" is a term in video games that refers to the detection of physics, so that you can make something convincingly bounce off another thing. It’s metaphorically apt because the whole idea of the blog was to bounce a bunch of ideas off one another, in my head and on the page.
MH: How many people read your blog?
CT: On average, it’s maybe 3,000 to 4,000 readers a day. At a peak, the biggest days have been 10,000 readers. And at the lowest, if I don’t post for a few weeks, it goes down to 1,000 to 2,000. It varies, depending on how much I’m posting.
MH: Who reads your blog? How much do you know about them?
CT: If I were to judge by the people who email me, it’s a pretty broad range, although it’s concentrated in people who are interested in science and the culture of science and technology. I attract certain subsets of people because I write a lot about video games and I have an obsession with unusual animal science, like giant squid and narwhals. My audience is interested in the same things that I’m interested in, but they’re all over the map. I’ve gotten email from government bureaucrats, people in the military, professors, teenage kids, artists, software people. It’s a pretty broad mix.
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MH: I'd like to quote from your article, Media in the Age of Swarm. "Ask writers who blog regularly (like me), and they'll tell you how exciting it is to be wired in directly to your audience." How exciting is it and how does it compare to print journalism?
CT: It's totally exciting and it's very different from print journalism. I was a print journalist before I had a blog and I never heard from my readers.
I don't believe the criticisms of the mass media as an unresponsive beast. I don't think that's true. They're quite responsive and they do respect their audiences a lot. But the fact of the matter is that they really don't want to engage one on one with them, maybe because it would just take too much time. You'd just be wading through endless emails.
Before I had my own blog, I didn't know what the hell people thought about my stuff because I rarely heard from them. When you start blogging , suddenly it's easy to find you, easy to hunt you down.
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MH: Why did you start the blog?
CT: There are two reasons. One of them is obvious. One of them is completely unobvious, but in retrospect, almost more important.
| Clive Thompson at the Genes & Cells Boot Camp lab |
The obvious one is that I was interested in using it as a sketch pad for my ideas. I was at MIT as a Knight Fellow, so I wasn't working, but I missed writing, so I thought I'd start blogging. It allowed me to take notes and think out loud about things I was interested in and develop my ideas. Which turned out to be a really cool thing to do and a lot of fun.
But there was a secondary motive. I wanted to establish myself as easy to find on Google. When you do a Google search for "Clive Thompson," it goes out and finds every page that has "Clive Thompson" on it. Then it ranks them in terms of how popular those pages are and it determines popularity by which pages have the most links pointing towards them. So whichever pages have excited enough people that go, "Hey, I'm going to put a link on my website pointing to this page," that goes to the top of the ranking. So if you searched for "Clive Thompson" before I started my blog, what happened was—
MH: Actually, I know, because when you first started your blog I’d forget the title and I’d Google "Clive Thompson" and I'd get the Rentokil toilet guy.
CT: Exactly, he's a billionaire.
MH: Now when I type in "Clive Thompson," the toilet guy doesn’t come up.
CT: He doesn't come up at all. I completely own "Clive Thompson." In fact, if you type "Clive" into Google, I'm the fourth or fifth hit. So I started the blog because when you're a freelancer, you don't belong to an organization. It's very hard to find you. So I needed to establish an unshakeable presence.
Google is the determiner of reality on-line and I know the way Google works. Blogs attract a lot of links; other bloggers link to you. You very quickly build up a huge amount of what's called "Google Juice." And sure enough, three months after I started the blog, with barely a couple dozen links pointing to me, I was already on the first page. Within a year, I was number one. Basically, I'm undislodgeable at this point in time.
MH: So you've obliterated the toilet guy.
CT: I've obliterated every other Clive Thompson. That's right. So this was a goal that remains my goal. That's one of the reasons why I keep blogging. I refuse to relinquish the number one spot on Google for "Clive Thompson."
MH: Your started Collision Detection in September 2002, when you were a Knight Fellow. How have your postings changed over the years and how has your blog style evolved?
CT: When I first started blogging, I was just posting short little things. I would find something interesting and I would go, "Hey, check this out." And that was really it. If you go back and look at those postings, they’re all short. I wrote a paragraph and I posted frequently, several times a day.
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Some blogs exist solely for people who just surf all day long and they're like, "Check this out, check this out, check this out." They'll post 20 things a day that are all one sentence long. And they're really cool because they're filtering the Internet for you. If you like their aesthetic, they'll find things that are interesting and save you the work. They're like a little concierge of culture and information.
Now I obviously like doing that, but I got busier when I went back to work, so I didn't have as much time to blog. And I began to realize that what interested me more was posting about something that I'd discovered and no one else had. Or posting about something that other people were blogging about, but only if I had something interesting to say about it. So I blogged less frequently and I blogged longer little essays, things that were at least 500 words and sometimes up to 1000 words. Every posting became like a mini essay. And that's the way I still write today.
MH: So most of your blog entries are riffs pointing to another piece of information?
CT: Yeah. My goal is to find something thought provoking, offer people a new way to think about it, and let them check it out themselves. I sometimes just write something that I'm thinking about—there won't be a link to anything, but that's rare. Or if there's something that's really big on the blogosphere, I'll try to find an unusual take on it.
For example, everyone's talking now about how Pluto is or isn't a planet. When I finally get some free time, what I'm going to blog about is the astronomical naming organization that names heavenly bodies. They have pages that list the rules. It's really interesting. Like asteroids surrounding Saturn have to be named after Norse gods. Or craters on Uranus have to be named after characters from Shakespeare or Alexander Pope. I'm not making this stuff up! These are the rules. It's more evidence of just how profoundly weird astronomers are.
MH: What’s the relationship between your blog and what you get paid to write for The New York Times, Wired, etc.?
CT: Sometimes it's a really straightforward relationship. I'll develop some ideas over the course of several weeks, or months, or even years on the blog. It will eventually make me realize, hey, there's a story here, and I'll talk to my editors.
Occasionally I'll post something on my blog and it will literally be, wow, I should just write this as a piece, and I'll go and write it for a magazine as a short piece. But more often it's inspiration and keeping my intellectual wheels greased so that I'm able to continually think of new ideas. It probably makes my writing faster and looser because I'm accustomed to regularly sitting down in the evening and blogging 2000 words on four different topics.
The blog reminds me of how I would write if I were speaking to intelligent people and I had no particular editorial dictates. Every magazine has a voice and you have to write to that voice. When you write for The New York Times Magazine, you're writing like yourself, but also like someone who's writing for The New York Times Magazine. The blog keeps me grounded in the way I sound to myself, except that there are fewer swear words, because I try to keep it family friendly.
MH: Do you think having a blog has helped you get jobs as a science journalist that you might not have otherwise gotten? Do your editors read your blog? How much does it help your career as a journalist?
CT: There are rarely direct effects, although I have had a couple of magazines call me up and say, "I read your blog, it's fantastic, I want you to write a piece about this thing that you did an entry on." That's happened a couple of times.
The blog builds my reputation as a broad-ranging intellect. Almost all my editors have read it and some of them read it regularly. I blog about things they had no idea I was interested in. They get a chance to see me thinking on my own.
MH: What niche do you try to fill in the magazine world?
CT: I think the niche that I've grown into is writing big connective ideas pieces about the social effects of scientific discoveries and new technologies. That's how I got into this business. I was writing pieces for Lingua Franca and Shift magazine back in the late 90s. I was always aiming to find a story that would be really cool on a scientific level and something you'd never heard of before, but that would let me make some enormous, maybe even too grandiose statement about human nature and society.
MH: Do you consider yourself a pundit?
CT: No. Not at all. God no. The short way of saying that is "I'm not a pundit, semicolon, I do research." I base my views on the smartest people I can find to talk to rather than just crap that I thought about at my breakfast table.
MH: The short descriptive paragraph at the top of Collision Detection states, “This blog collects weird research I'm running into, and musings thereon.” You’ve had recent postings about imagining ten dimensions and turning whale songs into electronic art. Does Collision Detection help alleviate your frustration about not having the time to write about things that you find cool and interesting?
CT: Yes, it does. I've seen so many writers get frozen because they become attracted to a story and they can't move on until they get that story out there. Either it's too weird, or it's too kooky, or the time peg is off, whatever. Nobody wants to take it. They will lose months of work, pitching and repitching and repitching.
That happened to me when I first started writing. But the blog helps me get past that. So now when I get an idea about something as I'm walking down the street, I think, "Okay, is The New York Times Magazine going to want that? No. Wired? No. Wired News? No. Details? No. Discover? No. New Scientist? No." And I think, "Okay, then I'm going to blog that." Five minutes of writing. Four hundred words. It gets it out there and it's out of my system. And it feels wonderful!
MH: So what's an idea that your brain's gotten stuck on that you couldn't sell?
CT: Everything on that blog! Everything on that blog is something that came into my mind and, was like, I can't sell this. Or I can't sell this yet. And so it goes in the blog. That is exactly what's on the blog—stuff that's just a little too unusual, a little too weird.
Also, I'm not a daily journalist, so, anything that I hear about that’s happening in a couple of days, I'll blog that, because the magazines that I write for all have three to four month lead up periods. Maybe it's harder to blog if you're a daily journalist because you'd continually be wondering, "Well, shouldn't this really be in the paper?"
MH: What science and technology blogs are a must-read for you?
CT: I regularly read Arts & Letters Daily. You'd think that it's all arts, but they do a lot of interesting culture of science stuff. I read Wired News a lot. They break interesting stories on the culture of science and technology. I read Slashdot and digg pretty religiously for technology related things. I read Eurekalert and all the different organizations that spit out new bits of research.
You know how I find some interesting stuff? It's by having a blog. People are blogging about your blog entries and you look at their blog. If they've linked to you, if they've said, "Hey, this guy Clive Thompson wrote this amazing thing about whale song," that means that they're interested in something that I'm interested in. So, odds are that their blog will have something interesting to me. One of the great things about a blog is that you figure out who the other people are on the planet that think like you.
MH: I sent around an email to the Knight alumni asking all the Fellows to tell me who had blogs.
CT: How many have them?
MH: I was shocked. Only one person responded—David Chandler, who has an astronomy blog.
CT: Yeah, you would think the Knights would all be verbose blabberers out there in cyberspace.
MH: So what advice would you have for anyone who is contemplating starting a blog?
CT: Oh, for God's sake, just do it. Don't fret about it. Just start posting stuff that you think is interesting and people will find you.
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| Clive on the Knight field trip to Havana |
Clive Thompson was a 2002-03 Knight Science Journalism Fellow. He's a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. He also writes for Wired, Discover, New York magazine, and Wired News, among others. His writing has been widely anthologized and was included in the 2003 Best American Science Writing. For a brief history of blogging, read Clive's timeline of blogging. You can email him at clive@clivethompson.net.
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