Cameron Neylon: things have moved on. people are no longer worried about loosing their job when blogging. - Roland Krause
Can blogging damage your career, or have things moved on from that? Peer review and issue of trusting sources and people. Does anything thing that there is a risk you won't get credit for blogging. - Michael Barton
is there a risk later in your carer that you won't get credit for an idea? That is, if you blog. - Ian Mulvany
Cameron's blog archive has gone 404... so, no first blog - Egon Willighagen
Richard Grant, once being seen by his friends as the court jester - now being paid by his faculty to fly here from Australia. - Roland Krause
Blogging to challenge. Do we assume blogging is bad for your career? How serious do management take blogging? Should you start anonymously? - Michael Barton
can someone in the room pls thank Cameron for his excellent mogulus videocasts from this morning! - mike seyfang
Takes issue with the assumption that blogging is bad for your carer - Ian Mulvany
Showcasing university of Sydney blogs. Arts and humanities faculty not worried about blogging. - Michael Barton
Few years ago, if you were caught emailing you would be considered to be wasting time. - Michael Barton
Depends what you blog on... if it's about your science life, it is a waste of time... if it's like ELN, then it's part of science activities (IMHO) - Egon Willighagen
popularity will come - compare blogging now and email in the past - Jo Badge
they are now making an analogy between email and blogging? If you ask where do you find the time to blog, one could as well ask where do you find the time to email. - Ian Mulvany
If you're not blogging effectively, you may be wasting time. - Michael Barton
How can you persuade powers that be as to the relevance of blogging. - Michael Barton
Down to the success or failure of the researcher. If you're successful, blogging is more likely to tolerated. - Michael Barton
Some 6-7 people have had trouble with seniors about them blogging... - Egon Willighagen
pmr asks how many people have had active hinderance vis a vis blogging, - Ian Mulvany
Blogging can help crystalise thoughts => think through topics. - Michael Barton
Scientists often feel that blog posts have to be perfect. - Michael Barton
Paper -> blog is ok, and has been possible for a long time. Blog -> paper is not yet counted by ISI, and does not add to your citation count, and that is an issue that needs to be overcome, but as someone here points out, it can raise your profile as a person who is passionate, interested, and knowledgeable about your subject. The issue of perfection of the blog post is a very interesting point, one needs to be allowed to be imperfect. - Ian Mulvany
Blogs useful for discussing half-baked ideas - Michael Barton
Different people are looking for different things in a blog. - Michael Barton
What is the importance of protecting IP, in context of posting on a blog. - Michael Barton
Many kinds of blogs: news items, personal experiences, (raw) research results (ELNs), conference coverage, popularization... this makes using blogs for citation counts unapplicable. I use blogs are easier way of emailing to two or more mailing lists... - Egon Willighagen
No credit system for posting work on a blog or wiki. - Michael Barton
What if someone publishes similar work to what you've blogged online, can you claim that you showed this work first? Even if it was on a blog. - Michael Barton
Cameron makes a very interesting point, who can say that they were the first to report on an issue. - Ian Mulvany
Somebody stole data from my blog to publish a Nature paper. Will an interview panel or funding body care that you discussed it on your blog first? - Michael Barton
Plagiarism is easier in the electronic age... - Egon Willighagen
Incentive needs to change from only publishing papers, to also include blogging. - Michael Barton
he asks us where he should say 'we were the first to report this' and point to a blog post. Im my opinion this is an important test case and he should absolutely do this. - Ian Mulvany
If blogging a result becomes the standard for reporting results for the first time, then all scientists need to know this is the case. - Michael Barton
ahh, another irish accent in the audience, wonder who that is. - Ian Mulvany
People's obsession with 'scooping', recognition, career limiting moves, outing their colleagues and IP issues makes me think that a truly great Research Institution would find ways to remove these significant barriers to innovation. That would create a climate / environment in which scientists are much more likely to innovate. My observation from the land down-under is that those science bloggers who are more concerned with the common good seem to be the most innovative. - mike seyfang
Blog as discussion rather than a citable piece of literate. Can a discussion in the pub be used as a citable object? - Michael Barton
Henry Gee thinks that blogs are not citable objects. Blogs have the flexibility to be changed, I disagree totally with this point. It seems to me the culture of the web is often tied to giving precedence to people who have been the first to do x, or say y, or mash up a and b. To be able to point to a source where an idea bubbled up seems always a reasonable thing to do. As ever AW comes up with the clearest comment on the issue. - Ian Mulvany
Egon on blogs as a replacement for news groups rather than journals. - Roland Krause
Where is blogging in the continuum between discussion and publication in a scientific journal. Generating kudos to get a job position, or invited to a conference. - Michael Barton
Many scientists don't realise that science is a continuous discussion. Testing and refuting hypotheses. - Michael Barton
Blogging is currently a long game which does not bring immediate rewards (like conventional publication), but can lead to longer term career advantages - assuming you survive that long... - AJCann
Molecular biology is a rapidly changing field. Most papers cited are less than five years old. - Michael Barton
No matter blogging, peer review, etc, etc.... the only thing that should count is: "Show me the Data!" - Egon Willighagen
Challenge from the panel: how can we get senior faculty blogging in a way that's entertaining and useful to the community - Lisa
How can we get senior faculty blogging that is entraining and valuable. Challenging audience to find and encourage senior faculty to set up a blog. - Michael Barton
incentive- featured in 2008 version of the Open Laboratory - Lisa
Winning blog will feature as first entry in The Open Laboratory 2008 - Michael Barton
and they'll pay for you to go to some bootcamp thing too! - Lisa
Nature will pay for blogger, and blogger encourager to attend SciFoo next year. - Michael Barton
Winning based on most interesting and senior faculty. - Michael Barton
"Plagiarism is easier in the electronic age... - Egon Willighagen" Nonsense. Please cite your evidence for this. If anything, as Jo said above, plagiarism is easier to detect in the electronic age. - AJCann
mirror in the room makes me feel that I am part of a Dutch Master - Ian Mulvany
yep, our local power block is full! people sitting on the floor - Jo Badge
one idea, blog anything that constitutes the least publishable unit, this then becomes part of the grey literature, and can become cited, if people know how to cite blogs, one can think of persistence, and then tying the conversation back ala postgenomic or such - Ian Mulvany
how permament are blogs - how does this relate to autobiography - Brian Derby commented that Feynman did write a lot of this up - although after the fact - Cameron Neylon
"the impermanence of blogs" - and there being no formalised connection between the anarchic literature (blogs etc) and the ordered one. - Andrew Walkingshaw
The various forms of scientific communication (peer review, general audience, etc.) - Roland Krause
@Ian: that mirror's kind of cool and kind of creepy in a slightly filmic way, isn't it? - Andrew Walkingshaw
the question of homesteading - sticking down an idea and claiming the area for yourself - Cameron Neylon
Comment: The importance of the idea in molecular biology research. Proposition of embargoed blogs. - Roland Krause
Comment: Use of an internal wiki instead - Roland Krause
Comment: Comparison of blogging to posters and presentations at conferences. - Roland Krause
Just because something is in a journal doesn't mean that it is permanent, in the sense that there are many venues for publication that will never get read. - Ian Mulvany
isues of embargoes and etc being raised - Jenny makes the point that people have already dealt with these issues in conferences - Cameron Neylon
so lab books are the comment lines in computer code for wetware! - Ian Mulvany
Data type rich note books... this is where ELN outscore the old book: you can insert imagery, screenshots, and,....really importnatly, the raw data! - Egon Willighagen
Problem of different notebooks for excursions, conferences, lab meetings, real work. Chronological vs subject organization. - Roland Krause
actually need multiple 'notebooks' - multiple projects, field notes, collaborators, large machines, chronological order vs narrative, protocols/cookbooks - Cameron Neylon
how much really goes in? how much do we edit in advance - Cameron Neylon
Voice recording is mentioned, in reply to pen-top computer... I was thinking about getting a mp3 recorder myself, for notes, when on my bike going to work... - Egon Willighagen
have a robot powered by an avatar in SL, and record all of the actions that happen, never have to get out of bed! - Ian Mulvany
Problem with paper notebook being on the bench vs. computer being elsewhere is not so big for people who have another notebook for quick notes: I always scribble things on a paper towel, or NAY paper lying around and then copy it to my bound paper lab notebook. Would do same with computer, but my objection is hassle of uploading pictures vs. time of pasting/taping in a paper picture - Eva
The music nerds I know tend to just record memos on their phone rather than phoning home - or more and more carry around a field recorder - think the audio equivalent of a Flip. (I didn't bring mine with me, maybe I should have...) - Andrew Walkingshaw
Clearly none of these people are microbiologists - laptop on the bench? The horror! - AJCann
Comment: Idea of recording notes for integration with ELN - Roland Krause
Jean-Claude talking now on Open Notebook Science - Cameron Neylon
Jean-Claude Bradley on open notebook science with 100% transparency. - Roland Krause
and what do you microbiologists do with your mucky paper notebooks? - Jo Badge
That'ts why we use cheap PC's (actually the ones already attached to instruments mostly - avoiding PC's and tablets for the reason AJCann mentions - Cameron Neylon
Blogs don't handle versioning, which is bad for a lab book - you need to track the changes with a timestamp. - Andrew Walkingshaw
JC refers to versioning in LNs, which is why the moved away from blog to wiki for ELN - Egon Willighagen
Safety officers OK with notebooks, not OK with computers on the bench ;) - AJCann
(so they use a wiki, which is "very flexible" - but I'd wonder what you lose in the way of machine-readable semantics... not that anything else on hte market is any better, really) - Andrew Walkingshaw
so what do you do with e.g. a UV spec in the lab? Or something else that has a ocmputer control it anyway? - Cameron Neylon
Andrew, not sure if they do, but they could use a semantic wiki... see what Henry Rzepa has done - Egon Willighagen
"not trying to subvert the traditional publication process, just to communicate what they're doing on a daily basis." - Andrew Walkingshaw
There is no specifc semantics in the wiki at the moment - its human readable, but the aim is to try and translate that to a machine readable form in the future - Cameron Neylon
(@Egon: I'm seriously not sold on any system which requires users to go out of their way to input semantics, and from what I've seen Semantic MediaWiki has a fair bit of that.) - Andrew Walkingshaw
(Andrew, agreed... GUIs is what chemists neeed) - Egon Willighagen
I feel what we need is systems that _encourage_ people to input semantic information as part of the natural work flow - Cameron Neylon
example of people finding a failed experiment - Cameron Neylon
The power explained by showing negative results (here with suggestions on how to improve) - Roland Krause
Cameron: using something like OSCAR (http://oscar3-chem.sourceforge...), I guess (at least in part). I've got to believe that the future has to involve the machines automatically capturing and posting the data and metadata; if you've got someone in the loop there's gonna be a day when they've not had enough coffee - or too much!- and... - Andrew Walkingshaw
JC mentions people being able to contact them about run experiments... this does require good search tools, which require semantics in one way or another... a PNG of the reaction is no longer sufficient - Egon Willighagen
andrew - absolutely - ideally the machines capture the metadata and the human user just connects the threads together - the less human intervention the better really - Cameron Neylon
oh yeah - here comes the bit about taking human mistakes out as far as possible - Cameron Neylon
citing lab notebook pages and raw data: that's very cool - Andrew Walkingshaw
question from Karen James - how hard is to set up the software - Cameron Neylon
I can't hide the feeling that the presented approaches are suboptimal... - Egon Willighagen
absolutely but I very much subscribe to jean-Claude's point - communicate first, standardise second - Cameron Neylon
I agree with that. We are communicating now, let's start paying attention the standardization... this is happening, but to a good extend a social problem, which makes this conference so nice... we have room to talk on what we like to achieve... - Egon Willighagen
JCB doesn't care about scooping: It is out under a CC license, so it can be cited. Some people in the audience are concerned that this is limited to this particular field. - Roland Krause
Independent of that - very important work. Nice session, the best so far. - Roland Krause
Based on my exhausting tester experience with Google Research Datasets, I would say that their system, even in it embryonic form is theoretically able to solve all of the problems of handling enormous amount of raw data, open notebook science and publishing primary research too. The problem is cultural: not everything that is functional and nice in open software can be applied to open science. - Attila Csordas
Just got to this - but agree with Attila - the advent of Google Research Datasets changes the ballgame completely. The technical infrastructure is falling into place - Cameron Neylon
Cameron, where's the video feed? And is it available to watch afterwards? - Eva
just like blogging you will also find your niche - Cameron Neylon
useful for science to get conversation going - however, how about those scientists who worry about their ideas being stolen by their competitors? - Jo Badge
Social aspect is very important in twitter (context). - AJCann
continuous partial attention to what is going (i am already way too busy) - Cameron Neylon
twitter is like a waterfall - stream of posts coming in - stick your head in - see what is happening - get a feel but you don't necessarily need to dive in and mark everything you read - Cameron Neylon
can lead to less frequent posts, more frequent updates - Cameron Neylon
matt thinks it is important to get the ideas out there and start the conversation - Cameron Neylon
Series of tweets can turn into blog posts later. - AJCann
comparison to the scientific method - the loop of idea to publishing paper, getting feedback, but takes time -microblogging can fill the gaps in the publishing process - Cameron Neylon
matt brown is recording a better video of the slides - so will try to get them linked up later - Cameron Neylon
an easy low stress way into open notebook science - Cameron Neylon
open notebook tweets, lab team tweets, checking on the current temperature of the lab or group - can collaborate with other groups - Cameron Neylon
you would need a VERY good relationship with your lab members for a PI to monitor lab tweets without it feeling like big brother - Jo Badge
twitter has an API -> automated notebook science -> laboratory (instrumentation) tweets (sequencer tweets) - Cameron Neylon
connected scientific method - connecting with people - connecting with instruments - private or public comments - Cameron Neylon
like the idea of automatic tweets for sequencers etc. back to the original cambridge coffee pot! - Jo Badge
connecting to other resources (Library tweets) - Cameron Neylon
risk of single point of failure - twitter has had reputation for poor availability - currently a lot better - Cameron Neylon
other services such as identi.ca - implements twitter API but distributed rather than localisd on servers - Cameron Neylon
but don't just want text - can send links to audio/video/photos etc - Cameron Neylon
talked about publishing - also need to consider subscribing - one person has many feeds - think I can see where this is going :-0 - Cameron Neylon
Aggregation is a rescue for multiplicity of streams - Cameron Neylon
Question for Matt (if someone can get it in in time) - is there an issue of people following people for professional reasons and seeing all their personal Flickr photos as well? - Eva
By "issue" I mean - will it scare people away, or be too overwhelming to be efficient? - Eva
question of spam or nonsense if for instance it is taken on by instutions - Cameron Neylon
@Eva - we all need multiple online personalities, personal and professional. - AJCann
question on the volume issue - how do you cope? Basically have to take the attitude that you're not following all the time - Cameron Neylon
question of finding another filter - the use of friendfeed to maintain the context of a specific conversation - Cameron Neylon
OOPS - forgot to hit refresh on this thread - discussion starting to fragment, here, twitter and mogulus chat. - mike seyfang
So that is YOUR laptop screen Cameron, you have also broadcast your probiscus once or twice ;-) - mike seyfang
I can't get onto the chat room on mogulus for some reason - but I think we're starting to push the limitations here. I am not seeing other people's comments until about five minutes later - Cameron Neylon
Question on the concern about scooping - how do you persaude people? - Cameron Neylon
the session on MB is getting the most MB comments ;) - Ian Mulvany
I agree with the last audience comment about the fact that things work because they are small groups of *like-minded* people (who was it? Alex? Egon? It was a Dutch accent.) I get overwhelmed when there are too many tech things posted on Twitter/Friendfeed, because I don't feel as connected with it, but can handle much more in terms of topics I *do* enjoy. - Eva
and we're done here. Roland Krause was the questions I think - Cameron Neylon
Mining features... take advantage of citation trees. Say, we have paper X, this is cited by a number of papers, which are cited by etc. On each depth, the citing papers form a cloud based on the user tags, describing the literature that it citing paper X. This gives a quick overview of the types of literature citing the original; effectively, giving an overview of the research lines that refer to paper X. Possibly, this can be extended to start with the papers {X1, X2, ..., Xn}. - Egon Willighagen
Yup, prepare for a barrage of blog posts and opinions :) (assuming I can make time) - Cameron Neylon
Egon, the analysis is known as Main Path analysis, I've been reading up on it. It's pretty cool. It could be also useful for filling in a users personal bibliography - Ian Mulvany
Tell me which papers I should read based on the ones in my collection. Facebook has a "people you may know" suggestion thingy. - Michael Barton
Off the top of my head, I would mostly like to see more integration like with Google Docs, Zotero, Open Office, MS Word. For me to be able to show that kind of integration to students would be a killer app. - John Dupuis
i'd like to see search by 2 or more tags together, sometimes tags edit doesn't work - Alexey
John makes an excellent point. The biggest problem with so many of these Web-based apps is that they aren't readily integrated. As a knowledge worker, I should be able to move between Nature's applications, Google's applications, and other third-party tools without having the system stall out on me. No one has (to my knowledge) really managed to deliver this. It's lots of cut-and-paste, or emailing of content, and other work-arounds. Fix that problem and, as John says, that would be a killer app. - Jill O'Neill
Aim to be the Nielsen of science ? ;) Get the users to add a browser plugin that can track readers habits across different scientific publishers. Link that to a profile that has users scientific interest and publications (NN). The users get back recommendations based on bookmarks, reading habits, articles similar to those that he/she published, articles recommended by NN contacts,etc. - Pedro Beltrao
Add ratings to bookmarks and let the users opt in to get a reminder once a week/month to rate articles bookmarked in the previous week/month (something like Netflix does for movies) - Pedro Beltrao
Get a couple of really famous scientists to use connotea and promote a page with their shared feeds (something like what google is doing now for Greader) - Pedro Beltrao
Hi Jill, John, it's a well well known problem, and I think that it's not impossible to get around on an app by app basis. Word should be OK, Google Docs is harder as there is no API yet that I know of (is there? is there?), but there might be a way to get bookmarks to sync with google bookmarks, and that would work. Ah, idea. - Ian Mulvany
Focus on literature bookmarks again, not any bookmark. - Egon Willighagen
Oh, if you keep any bookmark in, make sure to use it to contribute to a researcher impact factor, based on link counts, ala Google Page Rank, but counting not just papers, but software projects, databases, etc too. - Egon Willighagen
integration would be the key, but simple things like tab-completion of tags would be a good start - PauloNuin
What Deepak said. Does FF need a "bookmark" as well as a "like"? - Bill Hooker
Would love to see Connotea include a pdf upload like CiteULike's. - Bill Hooker
I was actually thinking about this the other day. Activity feeds - bookmarked, "starred", commented. Ability to link to local and network storage of PDFs (whatever system user chooses - Amazon S3, C: drive, Google Docs, whatever). Tag recommendations, article recommendations, open Recommender API, private groups, social network sharing, how's that for a start? - Richard Akerman
Must use citation tree, have a serious cite and write option compatible with existing word processors. - Aarthy
@CameronNeylon I'm liking prepopulate a lot in other contexts - it's a great way to kickstart IRs. - Richard Akerman
@Richard - I think its crucial to get people to understand what would be possible if they bring more people in. The benefits kick in when you have a whole research group for instance but until people see that this might be a good thing they are not going to expend the effort on bringing the rest of the group in. - Cameron Neylon
everything that http://www.citeulike.org does but better, pdf upload, download RIS/Bibtex per tag or per paper (rather than just one big batch), fix what is left of buggotea (thats a tricky one) http://www.nodalpoint.org/2006... and ditto what everyone has said above... - Duncan Hull
Integration with Nature Network. Direct PubMed queries. Private shared reference lists. And what Cameron says in his blog post... - Martin Fenner
Also, Connotea and CiteULike and 2collab and Mendeley need to get together and decide what fields in the RIS they're going to export and import as what data, so you don't end up losing data such as tags and comments when exporting and importing to another service. Citation tree, search/sort by date/author/journal, and easy integration with Word would be on my list - Mr. Gunn
I just wish it were better at what it's supposed to do, never mind the killer app. Fix the bugs, fix the speed/scalability and make it less ugly :) However, FWIW, the "killer app" in online reference management is not social; it's Endnote-like integration into word processors - of any kind. - Neil Saunders
Incidentally, there are already ~ 30 comments here, versus 3 at Nature Network; speaks volumes. - Neil Saunders
From my perspective, integration into word processors and easy IO would be the necessary requirement. The next would be good search engines that take into account relevance based on your "graph" as it were. That same engine can be used to drive a recommendation engine. If I had all of those, with a good API that could be used to drive mashups, and of course appropriate scalability and availability, then at least one person would be happy :) - Deepak
I'm pretty overwhelmed by the feedback, in a good way of course. Thanks so much for all of the suggestions. I'll now go and take them on board and try to beat them into some coherent shape. - Ian Mulvany
Have a citation tree (this article cites these articles) and pre-load with entire network of Nature citations (that is, articles cited by papers in Nature), highlighting some famous papers. - Richard Akerman
The ability to embed all or a portion of the library (i.e your own papers) in other sites, exactly the same way you would embed video in a blog. Would save me repeating my library across multiple sites and keep them sync-ed, rather than just including a link. Have a tag cloud, not a tag list. Present tags that other people have used to tag the same resource. Normalise your tags, for example use all lower case, TAGX and tagX can end up not pointing to the same document. - Frank
what everyone else said - plus, if you upload pdfs, why not do some nlp analysis and then map similarities? so extract key entitites and relationships and do analysis on those - Christina
oh - plus - if you get it down where you can integrate with Word or LaTeX or open office or what have you - you should also have an option to "work offline" - Christina
One thing that I absolutely *love* about Zotero is how it can pick up bibliographic information for books directly from library catalogue screens or when you're looking at a book in Amazon or whatever. When you're looking at a list of books in our catalogue, Zotero will show all the books in a list and let you choose the ones you want for your list of references. So cool. - John Dupuis
Take a close look at Zotero from a feature perspective. It's a great app. It's limited to FireFox but represents a hybrid desktop/web app that resembles what we'll be seeing. The community built around Connotea (i.e., the people willing to park and comment on citations, build good tags, etc.) may be the real value. Will that community persist once some people can do things others cannot do as Pro users? - Bill Flanagan
Hi Bill, that's a good point. If you look at flickr (my favorite freemium example), they have maintained their community with a two tier product. I'm interested in knowing what features we could add to Connotea that we could charge for that would retain the community. I have some ideas, but want to hear yours! - Ian Mulvany
Well, I am glad about the support in favor of word processor integration (Ian surely knows why). I would say that anything that can help scientists write papers will make Connotea more interesting over its competitors. Word processors integration would do. Other possible functions: 1) My articles feature with a warning if anyone bookmarks one of my works, with a mapping users/urls it may not be that hard to do. 2) See next post. - Mounir Errami
2) If we take two users randomly what are the chances that they share any bookmarks? the point is that a stat study can show when to introduce users to each other for collaboration, or simply because they share a similar interest (competition?). I would also dig around the time consuming paper submission process. For instance identifying reviewers, that's where suggestion 1 would pay. I have to think more about this one. - Mounir Errami
Ian, sorry for this late response (sorry all, no time to read all your 39 answers...). What I expect from connotea: 1) more reliable, faster. 2) an option for hiding my tags in my page and in the popup windon (takes hours to load !) 3) seeing my group just like delicious networks: hide my entries. 4) complete the profiles (geo-position: what is the closest person interested in NFkB ?). - Pierre
Someone mentioned fitting in the current workflow... that's an important point. Currently my writing/publishing workflow consists of free tools. Not sure what in that workflow would be worth paying a subscription for... Surely, looking up my H-index is fun, but my employer already payed for that, and I would not do that myself, nor ask my employer to do that. The freemium addon would have to be improve the workflow considerably... - Egon Willighagen
word processor integration (it's easy to compete w/ EndNote on price). [I paid for Mekentosj Papers even w/o this integration.] - Michael Kuhn
# of citations would not be up for pricing, but if we were to handle more bulky data that might represent an option, or if we were to have automagic functionality. - Ian Mulvany
I use only free software and web services, with the exception of a Flickr Pro account. Don't think any amount of features would make me pay for something as dull as reference management :) I'd just go back to local storage. - Neil Saunders
I think people would pay for word processor/doc integration but you'd have to sell that at institutional level not the level of individual users because an awful lot of institutions have endnote site licenses so no reason for indivduals to shift to something they have to pay for. - Cameron Neylon
Can you bundle it with the institutional subscription? or as an added option? - Cameron Neylon
I agree with Cameron. My institution has a RefWorks site license (actually, all of Ontario has it) so if I were to pay for something just for me it would have to be *vastly* superior. I believe EndNoteWeb is bundled with Web of Science so that also gives many people that option as well. As for people not affiliated with
