Blog guidance
If you don’t know how to blog about your research, here are some topic templates and questions that you can answer in your blog.
Research Blog:
- How do you describe what you do to someone from outside your field?
- What is it that excites you about your research?
- How is what you research different from what came before?
- What’s the most interesting thing that’s happened during your research so far?
- What’s the next big thing coming from your research field?
Recent published paper blog:
- What’s the exciting result from your paper?
- How did the idea come about in the first place?
- How is the paper different from what had been published before?
- Who did you collaborate with, and why?
- What’s the next paper you have planned? Will it be similar to this work or different?
Research Life:
- Why did you pick a career in research?
- Where did you work or study before Aalto?
- What non-work related activities do you do?
- What does a typical day look like for you?
- What’s the most exciting thing you’ve done as a researcher?
- What do you plan to do next?
Research trip:
- Where did you go, and how long for?
- Why did you visit them, what did you do there?
- How did you know the collaborators you visited?
- Will there be another trip, either back to their facilities or the collaborators visiting ours?
- What did you get up that wasn’t work related on the trip?
Conference trip:
- Where was the conference, have you been before?
- Briefly, what was the work you were presenting, was it a poster or presentation?
- What was the best question you got asked?
- What were the best talks/posters you saw?
- Did you meet any potential collaborators, will any new work come from the conference?
- What did you get up to on the trip that wasn’t the conference?
Other sections
Introductions
A short sentence or two that sums up the whole blog and can entice the reader to want to read the whole article.
Speaker Bio
A couple of sentences that explain who you are and what your expertise is. Should be lighthearted and non-technical.
Media
Images
A picture helps break up a text and is an essential part of a webpage. They are also prominent in social media links of articles. What constitutes a good image will depend very much on the post, but it should be
- Relevant
- Engaging
- Compliant with the blog policy
- Something you own the copyright for
In terms of aspect ratio, something that is 2:1 will work well as social media previews of URLs. Resolution should be as high as possible. File size should be no larger than 5 mb.
Video
A video at the top of the page is also an engaging way to open a blog post, and should be used in place of an image. This can work particularly well if you have video of research results.
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