I liked all of the list except "require participation in social activities", second from the end. I'm having trouble expressing quite how deeply fucked up that idea is. What are we, children to be told to do things "for our own good"? Picture it: "the lab's going bowling and you have to go" "or what, you'll fire me?". If people don't like each other enough to socialize willingly, what good is it going to do to try to force them? - Bill Hooker
I've been toying with raising the concept of 20% time in our group for a while. Would be great to spend, say Friday, working on things which while not directly relevant to the next publication, are of use - improving coding skills, hacking up web apps and so on. And quite agree that enforced socialising is just awful. - Neil Saunders
Indeed, trying to force people to participate in social activities is a really bad idea. It exists in an even worse version, though: requiring people to participate AND expecting them to pay for it themselves. - Lars Juhl Jensen
via http://www.emilychang.com/go/e...: "A project gallery featuring the best, and brighest open source / freely available PHP web applications. Allows community rating, commenting, and social bookmarking. Each featured php web app also includes a demo install with admin username/login so you can give the app a test run (databases are restored every 2 hours)." - Bill Hooker
Once, quite drunk on good vodka, late at night, wearing headphones and listening to a recording by Stephen Drury, I *almost* understood the meaning of Cage's "In A Landscape". Seriously. I can't recall the insight now, but I still like the piece, and have every intention of repeating the experience if I can. - Bill Hooker
The one I still need to understand fully, cause I really like it, is "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict" - Deepak
@JohnDupuis There wasn't room enough on Twitter, what I really wanted to say was something like (person you have never heard of whose feed doesn't appear to have anything to do with your work area). I guess I'm a bit harsh when it comes to limiting my social worknet to people who work in similar areas, but, err, I don't want my friendfeed to be full of cat pictures, if you know what I mean. - Richard Akerman
Richard, I agree. Or people that complain about their jobs or whose feeds are 99% trivia. One thing that bugs me on FF is that if someone subscribes to you, their feed can still be private. - John Dupuis
One nice thing on FriendFeed is that you can filter out if a particular channel is noisy, so e.g. people can hide my Twitter (which tends to be fairly chatty). I agree FF should have a reciprocal "preview", so that if they "friend" you, you have some opportunity to see some part of their feed. Also would be nice to block entirely by content (for example, I block all the last.fm stuff, but I have to do it person-by-person). - Richard Akerman
I find myself blocking a lot of people who are "Friends of X" - John Dupuis
Disagree about the reciprocal part -- I don't mind who subscribes to me, or whether their feed is private or not. Part of why I have a FF in the first place is so that if any of my stuff is of use to someone else, they can find it easily. I like to know about it when I help someone, but I don't *have* to. - Bill Hooker
Agree about the "friends of X" part -- many who read me probably hide my wife's stuff, for instance, since she sells books for a living and chats with authors on twitter a lot. The ability to hide specific channels is one of FF's *major* strengths imo. For myself, I block a lot of "friends of X" these days, since most of the bio/open geeks seem to have found the place already, and I block all twitterage, and that keeps the signal way above noise for me. - Bill Hooker
Bill, I don't think I was very clear about what I meant about being annoyed with private feeds. Whenever someone subscribes to me I like to be able to at least consider subscribing to them and being able to see their feed gives me an idea if they're, say, all about science or all about cats. - John Dupuis
Although, in general I really like the serendipity that the "Friend of X" brings into my feed. - John Dupuis
:) galah, sulphur-crested cockatoo, rainbow lorikeet, little lorikeet and eastern corella. Don't imagine any would taste too good, but all very pretty. - Neil Saunders
I want to "like" Sally's reply. Made me laugh out loud and scare a couple folks sitting near me. - Ricardo Vidal
I can tell you're at UQ, Neil! Used to make a pretty similar walk... - Michael Nielsen
You could get the same walking into ANU from O'Connor on a good day - Cameron Neylon
Continue to be jealous of southern hemisphere folk and their pretty birds, esp parrots - Deepak
It's the butterflies I miss, Deepak. There are not many of them here in Portland, neither species count nor individual count. Every year I go to the Oregon Zoo's butterfly exhibit (live hatchings in the summer, not preserved specimens!) and every year it makes me sad and happy in roughly equal measure. - Bill Hooker
Yet again I need a "bummed out" button instead of "like". - Bill Hooker
Just got an email to say that we had a grant (not one I was heavily involved with) rejected^H^H^H^H^H^H^H not funded. They had funded 3 out of 43 grants in the round. If I may paraphrase one of the people who actually put some work into the grant 'What's the f#$&*! point of wasting time writing these $!*&*!*! things' - Cameron Neylon
Was listening to someone have a conversation about likelihood of grant success this week. One of their suggestions: a preliminary assessment, submit a 1-2 page summary, so as people with no chance can be rejected before wasting any more time. Rather depressing. - Neil Saunders
That approach is quite common in some areas - I think it reduces wasted time at least - although its even more depressing when you bash through to the point where you have a notional 25-50% chance and still get knocked out because you've actually put more work in. Still I think its a good model - at least if you can make a good choice in that first cut. - Cameron Neylon
Their other suggestion: track record is a ludicrous measure for one pool of money, since early career researchers will never stand a chance. So two separate pools: one for the established high-powered biomedical teams led by professors (basically "here, have your money"), one for innovative less-established people with bright ideas. - Neil Saunders
I'm actually quite fond of the idea of giving everyone some baseline funding and then reserving grants for the occassional big stuff or really high profile researchers. Everyone else has to pool resources or keep things going on a relatively low level. Its the practical details that kill that idea really - Cameron Neylon
@Paulo: Holidays: biking, eating, sleeping, reading tech books, trying to catch a public WIFI connection in the street of a lost village in France, learning python, taking pictures to illustrate some articles in wikipedia - Pierre
"A major overhaul of the academic training pathway for life-scientists is long overdue. Issues linked to today's financial and job markets are an indicator that the time is right for a serious self-appraisal on the part of academia. Are we training too many students? And what should we do with all the postdocs?" - Duncan Hull
Alternatively... postdocs are trained to specialized, and they should apply to things just outside there PhD studies.... metabolomics anyone? - Egon Willighagen
In many cases, I get the feeling that post-docs are holding positions - Rajarshi Guha
80% of postdocs never get tenured positions. Looks like use and dispose to me... - Björn Brembs
I seem to see a lot of things like this pop up, and it always makes me seriously consider whether to do a post-doc, if I'm going to have to change career a few years down the line. - Michael Barton
IMO postdocs should be paid and treated on par with faculty and the position should be eliminated in favor of research scientist/staff scientist positions. The whole postdoc system is the academic system taking advantage of highly qualified individuals. One reason I never did one. - Deepak
I can't complain, and at the same time complain, about my two experiences as a post-doc. On the other hand my wife cannot complain about hers. IMO post-docs should be limited and replaced by staff positions in uni/institutes, with a limited contract or not, that can be linked to productivity (either in publications, grants, duties performed, etc). Give at the same time more responsibility and more freedom, so one can apply to grants, etc on her/his own. - PauloNuin
@Mike, you have to bear in mind the "80% never make it" figure is based on the United States, I think the situation in the UK is much better, though of course it can still be tough. - Duncan Hull
The company I'm with just hired a 5th year(!) postdoc. She would have been perfect for a staff scientist position, had there been one available at her university. - Mr. Gunn
I got my PhD in 1998. I switched countries once and fields twice, and couldn't work for a year because immigration wouldn't let me, so I guess my circumstances are odd, but I know people who were 10 years a postdoc without any such upheavals. - Bill Hooker
Yeah, I know several people who have been postdocs for about 8-10 years. And that's why I don't even want to start one. I don't have enough publications now, I'd need even longer than 10 years to catch up with everyone, and I don't like bench work, so I'd only be doing it with the hope of one day getting away from the bench and being allowed to think about science from behind a desk. Forget it, there are other ways to find jobs thinking about science from behind a desk. - Eva
My situation is remarkably similar to Bill, except I switched countries twice and didn't have the year off. Have to say for the first 5-6 years, the postdoc lifestyle was just fine. It can be good to be able to move around, chop/change, chuck it all in once in a while. There's a lot of peer pressure which aims to make people without clear career plans feel like failures; I think it's best to ignore it. - Neil Saunders
Agree with that sentiment. It's not a failure at all. I think the failure lies in a system that does not seem to give highly educated people more options and their due. - Deepak
My name is joevita, i saw your profile today and became intrested in you,am looking for a nice man that knows how to take cara of a woman that can take cara of me in any thing .i will also like to know you more,and if you can send an email to my email address,i will give you my pictures here is my email addras(awajoevita@yahoo.co.uk) I believe we can move from here! Awaiting for your mail to my email address above joevita. - joevita
How does one flag spam comments on FF? I really don't want this joevita comment to remain here! - Bora Zivkovic
@Bora: I don't know whether there's a flagging mechanism, but you can block a user and never see them again. If spam pops up here now and then, I don't mind just blocking it myself. If it gets worse, I guess the FF team will have to implement a fix at that level. - Bill Hooker
Seen a couple of these in the past 2 days; surprising there aren't more in a way! I agree - very annoying and requires some action. Should we be able to delete comments from our own posts, or is that not in the spirit of FriendFeed? - Neil Saunders
Now that I blocked this user I will never see (but others will) when that person comments again....introducing potentially funny threads.... - Bora Zivkovic
OA journal Nucl. Acids Res. defending its author-side fees and explaining what your money buys. I'd like to see more detailed breakdown of costs vs income, but even this is good to see. - Bill Hooker
Pullquote: "CollabRx builds and operates Virtual Biotechs for foundations and patients who urgently seek cures for their diseases. Working with these foundations and research institutions, CollabRx
* builds teams of top researchers
* facilitates planning of a strategic road map
* brings best practices to therapy development
* manages the execution of the plan
The CollabRx research platform connects researchers to one another and to a network of scientific services, providing unprecedented opportunities for knowledge sharing and economies of scale." - Bill Hooker
Need to look into this again. It's been on my to do list for far too long - Deepak
I tried to request sponsorship from them for the PSB open science workshop but no response after one reminder. I may try one more time I guess - Shirley Wu
"Cognitive technology allows cognizers to offload some of the functions they would otherwise have had to execute with their own brains and bodies alone; it also extends cognizers' performance powers beyond those of brains and bodies alone. Language itself is a form of cognitive technology that allows cognizers to offload some of their brain functions onto the brains of other cognizers. Language also extends cognizers' individual and joint performance powers, distributing the load through interactive and collaborative cognition. Reading, writing, print, telecommunications and computing further extend cognizers' capacities. And now the web, with its distributed network of cognizers, digital databases and sofware agents, has become the Cognitive Commons in which cognizers and cognitive technology can interact globally with a speed, scope and degree of interactivity that yield performance powers inconceivable with unaided individual cognition alone. " - Michael Nielsen
See one of my favorite books, _Natural Born Cyborgs_. Changed the way I think about what I do. - Dorothea Salo
Michael, if you haven't already read it, I strongly recommend Richard Poynder's interview with Stevan Harnad. It is an excellent introduction to the larger cogsci issues that drive Harnad's advocacy of OA. - Bill Hooker
Bill - thanks for the recommendation, I'll take a look. - Michael Nielsen
Dorothea - I tried reading it a couple of years back, but put it down for some reason. Will take another look. - Michael Nielsen
This seems to connect with John Wilbanks's proposed talk (which you posted yesterday) -- I'm not entirely sure I understand his vision, but it seems to involve "offloading" the "the transformation of knowledge" onto computers by storing knowledge in a machine readable graph format. - Hilary
Hilary - I read that material in John's abstract as a reference to the semantic web. I believe John has a background in work on the semantic web. - Michael Nielsen
I have a feeling some people would be more comfortable with something like this than with OWW, precisely because they paid for it and so feel they have control. Control seems to be a big issue with the anti-open crowd... - Bill Hooker
Wow, based on your bookmarks recently it looks like you are having some dual-boot problems at the moment ! (... er ... I didn't intend that to sound like Clippy the helpful Office paperclip :P ) - Andrew Perry
hehe... you do sound like clippy - I sold my laptop on ebay, and the guy wanted only Vista instead dual boot with Linux... and to position myself, I use Vista only for the Microsoft flight sim... - Ntino
What, FlightGear isn't good enough for you? ;-) http://www.flightgear.org/ [I'm like the anti-clippy: "It looks like you're trying to install proprietary software. Would you like to try something free and open source instead?"] - Chris Lasher
Every machine should have Anti-Clippy pre-installed as ineradicable firmware! :-) - Bill Hooker
Definitely timing is an issue. At least in as much as there should be an absolute cut off. But there is also a place for an explicit statement on published papers as well as part of the sharing statement. - Cameron Neylon
@Cameron. Do you mean in terms of "All papers will be OA"? or "All data is open after(or in parallel with) publication"? - Frank
Just that publication in papers is a part of data sharing. I would say that all papers will be OA as far as is practicable (and then put money in to cover it) but publication remains part of the communication process and so should be explicitly mentioned. Mechanisms are important as well. I think in most people's minds publication will be linked with the date of sharing other material as well. - Cameron Neylon
I think that is a good point about explicitly stating the publication mechanism, I will add that, thanks - Frank
Now, having read the whole article, it reinforces the view that the social components of PLoS One need to be improved, i.e. reputation of commenters/raters and the visibility of contributions/contributors have to be increased. Could FF and NN yield some ideas for that? - Björn Brembs
Lowering friction is important. The key is to understand how and why people get there. Once that happens, the way options are presented to them becomes critical. It has to become part of the flow. I am not sure if it is about the reputation, or the flip part. People think that commenting somehow hurts their rep - Deepak
What I'd be interested to know is what percentage of traffic to PLoS One goes 1) hit article page 2) click "Download Article PDF" 3) bye. Because if that's the majority of the workflow (which would be my guess), that means the reader's workflow doesn't include any of the social net tools, since they're reading in Acrobat Reader. Maybe we need to socialise Acrobat? UPDATE: And Mac Preview, etc. - Richard Akerman
My workflow involves the Mac application Papers. The PDF is downloaded automatically and I never browse to the website. - Martin Fenner
Richard. Likewise. I am sure they have those numbers, but not what I saw. - Deepak
Richard, I think that you are spot on! Here is my workflow: PLoS ONE abstracts come into Google Reader, I go and download PDFs of the ones that seem relevant to me, put them in a directory together with PDFs from other journals that I need to read. Several days, I read these PDFs and archive them. To comment on a paper, I would thus have to actively track down the web page on PLoS ONE again, which is work. I generally try to avoid work ;-) - Lars Juhl Jensen
PDF is not the best social medium is it. It's controlled by one company, is not "web friendly", etc, but this gives rise to another idea. Blog post to follow - Deepak
Good point about numbers versus people who actually engage. What I found interesting (once I was looking at the right stats) was that there seem to be more comments than ratings despite the fact that ratings should involve less 'friction' - Cameron Neylon
So maybe discussion as part of workflow would fit better in the (current) bookmarking/ref management space (Connotea, Zotero, Mendeley et al.)? (Or in some kind of PDF extension to bridge to same?) - Richard Akerman
I think I remain in a very small minority of people that only view papers online in html form - but I am pretty bad at rating and commenting because I'm usually not logged into the system - so when I think to do it it doesn't work so I don't bother... - Cameron Neylon
Well the thought being, maybe PLoS should think about becoming a platform, which drives commentary elsewhere. In other words, does a publisher have to be a destination site? - Deepak
I comment way more than I rate, because if there is something negative I have to say about a paper, I have the option of trying to word it in a way that isn't offensive (after all, I'm not tenured). With ratings, this isn't possible (at least not without a long-winded comment on the rating, which defeats the purpose of rating), so basically, the few ratings I've produced are all good. Maybe more people think like that? - Björn Brembs
@Deepak that's along the lines of what I'm thinking - probably the publisher should just try ways to 1) Enable discussion to take place in the reader's workflow of choice 2) Aggregate those discussions back for display along side the article. In a way that's similar to the direction that PostGenomic and other tools point - discussion that is DOI/URI centric, not hosted in any one particular location. - Richard Akerman
FYI I left a couple of comments on both Deepak and Cameron's posts. Pete Binfield (Managing Editor, PLoS ONE) - Peter Binfield
Also, Cameron regarding your reading habits (and PDF in general) - this is an interesting one as many publishers still ONLY provide PDFs for their articles (outside the leading STM journals, and also in places like Social Sciences, 'PDF only' is quite common). Pete Binfield (Managing Editor, PLoS ONE) - Peter Binfield
I have a question for this group. Our data shows that approx 23% of all articles have some form of text comment left on them by users. When comparing this to the BMC data that Euan analysed (which showed more like 2%), this sounds high. Is it? If it is high, why is it high? How can it be made higher still? - Peter Binfield
Two quick comments: Richard's insight about workflow is brilliant -- we need a pdf reader that remains connected and can be social -- and @Peter, in re: "why is it high"?, two words: Bora Zivkovic. :-) - Bill Hooker
It's relatively high, yes - but nobody knows what the upper limit is (could this be estimated somehow?). My guess is that it is higher than BMC because the research published in One gets more attention. At least in my field, I only very rarely come across a paper in a BMC journal... - Björn Brembs
Gosh, this is interesting. Hey Pete, thanks for dropping by on FF. A few comments. Like Cameron, I now read html (where I can) rather than PDF. I too have left far more comments than ratings. Over the last year, I also have noted a continued trend that in "Google news", the ratio of PLoS v BMC Manu's being reported on by e-media is dramatically in favour of PLoS. - Graham Steel
I am an html person as well, but I think the kind of stuff Richard is talking about is where the real value lies. We are on the web, so we should be thinking differently. PLoS One already took steps in that direction, but why stop - Deepak
Latest 'Google News' stats. PLoS = 3252, BioMed Central = 385 - Graham Steel
Agree with Richard/Deepak that the journal is probably the wrong place to be doing the commenting, Kind of what I was getting at with questions re: bookmarking and whether rating per se makes sense at all in my post. - Cameron Neylon
@Peter - well I don't read those journals :-) And second Bill's comment - Bora is a whirlwind like force that can be very hard to resist. I think a lot of the rise is down to his efforts. - Cameron Neylon
"whirlwind like force" - can I put that on my CV? ;-) - Bora Zivkovic
wrt pdf-reading, there's now Quosa and ScienceDirect is coming out with an easy tool to download piles of pdfs... but i'm not sure how much/what impact these will have on recommender features and social features... - Christina
@Graham - although it is nice to see the Google News stats :) to be fair to BMC's titlesm they probably don't have press releases that say "as reported in The BioMedCentral Journal X" - they probably just say "As reported in Journal X". For us, PLoS is part of the journal's name. - Peter Binfield
wrt to the discussion about where to collect comments. The historical position of publishers has always been that all discussion about an article should happen on the article. In the real world, of course, commenters comment in a multitude of places. However, as a reader you want to read the canonical article and then read all associated discussions without having to leave the article to do a variety of other searches. Question then is how to aggregate everything back to the paper comprehensively & easily? - Peter Binfield
To which end, aggregating discussions using the DOI as the unique identifier is suggested above. Great, of course - and I would love to see that day. But again reality impinges - the DOI is rarely used by anyone when commenting or indexing a paper. For example, Connotea and CiteULike dont have a search field for DOI. 'Big Media' will rarely even mention the full title of the paper, let alone the DOI or a trackback. It will be interesting to see if researchblogging.org indexes and searches against DOI. - Peter Binfield
I coming to this subject from FF and haven't heard of it before Cameron and Deepak blogged it. Will PLoS One (or someone else) provide links to all these reviews? - Jere
Jere ... watch Bora's blog. I am sure he will assemble everything - Deepak
@Peter We're not too far away - have you seen Alf's "Conversations" app http://tinyurl.com/2d7pem ? The tools are all here. Admittedly tracking mentions in big media is a problem, but in theory publishers could be tracking that info with clipping services and then make it available to aggregators by adding metadata to the paper. - Euan
... or MSM articles could be matched to papers automatically, given the right tools (something like Scintilla could potentially do that). Especially if the tool also had access to publisher press releases. - Euan
I would say one important issue with 'discussions around a paper' (which happen in a broader universe than just Commenting ON The Paper) are that if a reader of the paper is never made aware of the prior discussions and the (hopefully) insightful thoughts, then those thoughts are, to some extent, wasted effort. Each article should of course be the jumping off point to find all comments about it, wherever they are located (and preferably should aggregate those comments to itself). - Peter Binfield
Would fast cheap "video conferencing" help this? Already I don't understand why computer monitors don't have a small video camera built in as a standard thing, with video conference software also standard with the OS. Surely soon this will be the case and even now the hardware/software is pretty cheap to get and easy to use. - Bill Hooker
Online collaboration for paper writing works well for me. But the tools could be better. - Martin Fenner
Bill, I was recently trying to understand how video conferencing would help in research, but for that one would need to install cameras in the lab (or its equivalent), not in the conferencing room (as it usually happens). There's simply not enough people with such setup to see if it actually works. Martin, writing works for me too, but the whole process before writing is usually a bottleneck. - Pawel Szczesny
I know a few groups that use videoconferencing today. Cheapest example I saw was my buddy Hari on his isight while he was at a synchotron. Of course, IM works great too as do things like Campfire - Deepak
The Mac OS offers a cheap video conferencing solution and has for years. Multi-participant video iChat is quite good via included cams. Granted, it is difficult to have multiple participants at a single location -- that is, in front of a single camera -- but you can't beat the cost and the ease of use. - Todd Harris
I saw a good use of an iMac between two labs in different buildings at MIT. Just set up in a corner running all the time and it almost created the illusion of the two labs being joined. To the extent that people waved on the way past. - Cameron Neylon
Definitely technology is here or almost here, but to convince people to use it is another story. But even if that could happen, I have no idea if technology will remove the need of face to face meetings. Few more months of missed opportunities because of my location and out of frustration I will have to move to US. - Pawel Szczesny
Properly read the post now :-) I think one of the big issues is having some context to put the online interaction into. It can be much easier to have those conversations if you can see in your mind how you think the other people will react (interesting question as to whether the accuracy of that model is important) - Cameron Neylon
Cameron, what do you mean by context (model)? - Pawel Szczesny
Sorry, wrote that sentence the wrong way around. Basically just saying that using a face to face meeting to kick something off really helps because you've got some sort of view of how the other people might react. Just that having made that personal connection in RL its much easier to carry it on online - Cameron Neylon
@Cameron - there's a couple of papers out of CREW at UMich on supporting computer mediated communication (in science and engineering) - particularly one called "distance matters" -- a f2f meeting does help with trust and establishing common ground - video conferencing not really necessary unless language issues.. - Christina
Some great results coming through... How about a new or refurbished logo? I can whip up something quick... - Ricardo Vidal
I may be a dissonant voice but I never found clouds useful or informative in most cases. Whenever I have the option to turn-off a cloud display, I prefer to do so. - PauloNuin
I'm with Paulo -- never have got much out of cloud displays. Seems my brain just doesn't work that way. - Bill Hooker
The thing that I think is cool about this approach is that it goes much deeper into the result set and attempts to gleen a high level view of the content. For example, my wife was searching for kids Playsets and wasn't finding what she was looking for, she was simply shopping. She switched to MeemCloud and one of the key phrases was "Arsenic". Up until that point she had no idea that Arsenic was even an issue, and she wouldn't have known unless she was on page 10 of a typical search result. - David Clements
Clouds are like heat maps. You can't use them in all situations, but when I look at one, there are a few things that just jump out which I would not see so easily any other way - Deepak
Deepak, I like that analogy. There have been a few instances where I have been googling for something, and I didn't even really know the context. After a few failed attempts I dump it into MeemCloud and eventually find what I am looking for. One example was trying to understand what Adobe Tamarin project was all about and what it even meant. After dumping it into MeemCloud I quickly understood -- Javascript VM, Adobe , Open Source, Flash Scripting Engine. Example: http://is.gd/1X1v - David Clements
via Vince Smith (http://vsmith.info/): "essentially a mashup of content from Wikipedia and flickr, pinned around the Catalogue of Life classification. Users can submit their own observation data linked with photos through their flickr account, and build life lists of the species they have seen. There are Google Map mashups and a neat time-line that allows users to see the date of their observations (something that would be vital for birders). You can also submit requests for species identifications through a forum" - Bill Hooker
Wow. I had almost the exact same idea for a fun side web project. Since I have no time for such projects anymore, it's great that someone else did it :) - Neil Saunders
I hope this spreads around blogs - it is a cool idea, but only if there are LOTS of people doing this it will also become a resource. - Bora Zivkovic
If you promoted it as nudism, you might actually succeed too :) - Deepak
Agree with Bora - a great resource, if enough people. Eva's recent post "me first, social later" is relevant here. If it's well designed, it will appeal to individuals who like to record these kind of data. Get enough people and the network effect kicks in. I see a flaw or two in their interface just now e.g. no calendar for the "when seen" field. - Neil Saunders
although, a lot of the groups I belong to on flickr manage to incorporate a lot of identification data gathering and consensus within the group. "Just Skippers!" for example, a group that's just about Skipper butterflies. Someone will post a pic of one, ask for an ID. People will say "I think it's x skipper, or could be y's skipper" "Really? Never heard of those ones" "Where in the country are you from?" "Which country?" "Oh, are you from overseas?" "No, I'm right here" etc… Sometimes it works, though. - Ian Tindale
