Science Blogging 2008

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Science Blogging 2008

A room dedicated to the Science Blogging conference, being held in London on 30th August, 2008. Hosted by Nature.

Maxine posted a link

Event on 24 Sept: Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social NotWorking? from Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum on Nature Network...

15 hours ago - via Reshare - Link

Jo Brodie liked this

"Second of British Library "Talk Science" quarterly cafe scientifique evenings. Timo Hannay talking. London, 6-8.30 p.m. I'll be there. - You via Bookmarklet (edit | delete)" - Maxine

Jo Brodie posted a link

Might be of interest to those with librarian tendencies - Google, Microsoft, Last.fm and Yahoo were the ones I'd heard of

12 hours ago - Link

an entry from Nature Network - Recent topics from Science Blogging 2008: London

Continue the conversation here! What will science blogging look like in 5 years? (0 replies)

17 hours ago - Link

Maxine posted a message

“If anyone is still around in London on Friday (5th) who was at Science Blogging and would like to drop in to Nature during the day, please contact me at m.clarke@nature.com”

20 hours ago - Link

marco boscolo posted two links

sciblogging 2008 report, part.2 (in italian, I know...)

21 hours ago - Link

sciblogging 2008 report (in italian, I know...)

21 hours ago - Link

Maxine posted two links

Improving science blogging from Science Blogging 2008: London forum on Nature Network

yesterday at 2:00 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

XML is my DJ - Tales from a future screen - Marco Boscolo's blog on Nature Network

yesterday at 1:58 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Karen James posted a message

“So when are we gonna hear about the "Grand Challenge"? I think I've already got someone lined up - he's got lots of letters after his name!”

yesterday at 4:46 am - Link

Cameron Neylon and Jill O'Neill liked this

In the next 24 hours - they're just finalising the wording. - Matt Brown

I'm just trying to think who would be the most unlikely scientist to blog - Clare Dudman

Its coming, its coming! I think the wording is agreed... - Cameron Neylon

Maxine posted a link

Keeper of the Snails: Sciblog 2008 (part 4)

yesterday at 12:46 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Martin Fenner and Jill O'Neill liked this

Maxine posted a link

Keeper of the Snails: Sciblog 2008 (part 3)

yesterday at 12:47 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jill O'Neill liked this

Maxine posted a link

Keeper of the Snails: Sciblog 2008 (part 2)

yesterday at 12:50 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jill O'Neill liked this

Maxine posted a link

Keeper of the Snails: Sciblog 2008 (part 1)

yesterday at 12:56 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

Martin Fenner and Jill O'Neill liked this

an entry from Nature Network - Recent topics from Science Blogging 2008: London

Improving science blogging (0 replies)

yesterday at 8:04 am - Link

Alexey liked this

Graham Steel posted a link

"We're Scientists"

Monday at 2:39 am - Link

Karen James, Attila Csordas, Mr. Gunn, Martin Fenner and 3 other people liked this

Maxine posted two links

Anyone for one last SciBlog drink? - M@ blog - Matt Brown's blog on Nature Network London

Tuesday at 5:45 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Invitation to pub 7.30 tonight (Tues 2 Sept) from Matt - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Sciblography - The End Of The Pier Show - Henry Gee's blog on Nature Network

Tuesday at 5:37 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Yes, over the past few days my NN snapshot has been chock-a-block with new connections between people who were at the conference. (And I've made some new NN connections as a result, too.) Henry has written a great post about this. - Maxine

Jo Badge posted a link

My initial thoughts on the meeting

Monday at 3:42 am - Link

Kristin Alford, Bora Zivkovic, Martin Fenner and Neil Saunders liked this

Good to read a more measured, critical account than "everything was great and lovely" :) - Neil Saunders

The "critical account" seems to be more about the "backchannels" of people writing online, rather than being a summary of what was said at the conference itself. I like the description of Nature Network as "cosseted", wonder what that means? Neil, why am I not surprised at your take? ;-) - Maxine

I don't mean critical as in negative. I mean interesting thoughts about different aspects of the meeting, their relative interest and importance, the open questions. - Neil Saunders

I was glad you could join the breakout group on tracking conversations via FF, Neil, even though I didn't realise you were contributing at the time -- only found out afterwards when I read the blog of the session on FF. - Maxine

Maxine posted a link

Amazon.co.uk: Bad Science: Ben Goldacre: Books

Tuesday at 5:03 am - via Bookmarklet - Link

Jo Brodie and Heather liked this

Maxine posted a link

Keeper of the Snails: A geek! (and proud...)

Monday at 2:29 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

an entry from Nature Network - Recent topics from Science Blogging 2008: London

Health Services Journal (HSJ) has some bloggers (0 replies)

Monday at 4:41 am - Link

Henry Gee posted a link

eldritch and preternatural thoughts of a chthonic stylee

Monday at 4:54 am - Link

Enro posted a link

And now for some liveblogging of the event in French...

Monday at 3:04 am - Link

Cameron Neylon and Pierre liked this

Ian Mulvany posted a message

“break out session: creativity. things you can't do with a coathanger: understand henry gee”

August 30 at 4:30 am - Link

well, I wouldn't try to understand me with a coathanger. Not unless it was made of yoghurt. - Henry Gee

Ian, I personally thought you had the most creative responses - if originality can be conflated with creativity. But perhaps the creativity we were trying to solicit was in deconstructing the answers (i.e. how can you make those things that don't go with a coathanger, indeed go with a coathanger in some way?). - Heather

Yes, Ian had Joyce like superb free associations - Attila Csordas

Egon Willighagen posted a link

Guys (and Grrls), as requested in the afternoon unconference in the library: use ubiquity to add semantics while blogging -> "Ubiquity fun: entering semantic...

Sunday at 7:51 pm - Link

Lisa, Richard Akerman, Pierre and Neil Saunders liked this

Might anyone test this on Nature Network, please? - Egon Willighagen

From what I see in the screenshots, it probably won't work on Nature Network. NN adds links in a different way. Not html but with quotation mark. A link there would "look like this":http://### - Eva

Egon, thanks for your scripts and for pointing me to ubiquity. Your resolve-doi script seems to require a rich text editing field. Nature Network (and probably many other blogs) uses Textile and complains. - Martin Fenner

Egon, the add-doi and sechemtic-inchi scripts work in a Nature Network blog editing field. But again, the output is HTMl and not Textile. But this requires only minor tweaks and is a great way to put together a set of science blogging tools. - Martin Fenner

Michael Barton posted a message

“A reccuring theme for me in this conference was how much credit or even should a scientist get for maintaining a science blog.”

August 30 at 12:30 pm - Link

Matt Wood, Heather, Bora Zivkovic, Alexey and Dimitar Vesselinov liked this

Should we be making such a big deal about "science blogging" as such. Doesn't that make a blog a bigger deal than it should be? - Deepak

A point that came up a couple of times was what does it mean to post novel scientific data on your blog. Can it be considered a unit of research to be cited, for instance can it be used to say 'We showed this first', even if someone later publishes on the same topic before you. - Michael Barton

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A second point was that if blogs were ever to become 'citable' what does it then mean when applying for jobs, or grants. What is the worth compared with published articles? - Michael Barton

Well, I'd extend that beyond blogs. A blog is just way of maintaining a web presence. The important questions are: What are the best ways for scientists to share information via the web? How can that be cited? What are the implications? - Deepak

Just from my point of view, the last two questions you wrote received a lot of discussion. I think once blog posts start getting cited the line gets blurry between journal articles and blog posts. Setting aside the importance of peer review, how can a blog be cited? When you cite a blog post you giving scientific 'points' to it. Someone also pointed out that the text and time stamps of blog posts can be manipulated after publication, which is not the case for published manuscripts. - Michael Barton

I prefer to think of "scientific web presence" as something equivalent to "scientific meeting presence". It is not something that count on your CV, but few scientists would argue that it is not important to know the right people (not to mention the importance of them knowing you). - Lars Juhl Jensen

Also, if you write blog posts that you think should be considered citable non-peer-reviewed research, no one prevents you from submitting this work to a repository such as Nature Preceedings. EDIT: this would also address the issue of having an authoritative time stamp on your work. - Lars Juhl Jensen

That's a good point about nature preceedings. A DOI to an immutable body of text and timestamp would prevent any questions of post publication editing. Nevertheless, would you want to submit every blog post to NP, and I don't NP would accept it either. Following this point, the was also discussion as to if blogging becomes a citeable unit then it could be used to 'stake out' scientific territory, which would obviously be bad. - Michael Barton

No, I clearly would not want to submit every blog post to NP. To be honest I have not submitted any so far, but I do consider submitting the ones that contain new primary research results. - Lars Juhl Jensen

I used and like NP, but I guess it would be good if there was some way of getting a NP-type third party timestamp for blog posts to verify data and format of the text as it was written and published. Even with this verification, today gave me the impression there would still be a large debate as to what a blog post describing novel results means. - Michael Barton

Michael, we agree - what has held me back was both the work involved in reformatting a blog post to a PDF file and the feeling that it doesn't make sense to duplicate the content by putting it both on my blog and in NP. It surprises me that people are debating what "describing novel results" means - I assumed that it would mean exactly the same as it does when writing a paper. But maybe the point is that for a paper the peer reviewers are the ones who judge whether you have novel results or not? - Lars Juhl Jensen

The example in the final session, was that if you discuss a piece of novel research on your blog, that is later published in journal by someone else, what rights do you have in terms of claiming you were first with the results? I guess the discussion wasn't so much on what is novel results, as differing importance of publishing first on a blog vs. first in a journal. - Michael Barton

I see. I guess it is one of those problems I don't even think about because of my blogging strategy: the research results that I put on my blog at the ones that I don't think it is worth my time trying to make a paper out of. If someone else wants to pick up the ball and run with it, then I really have no reason to feel scooped. But can see that this might be a problem for others. - Lars Juhl Jensen

Fascinating discussion alright. Just to clarify my above statement about web presence, I was referring narrowly to content management systems, of which blogs are just one, probably the most common and likely type, but you can't ignore Wikis or a custom CMS or a Drupal-based system, etc. - Deepak

I think it's possible to make sci blog citable by articles published in peer-reviewed journals. Some digital and even printed journals started to do that.But mostly in IT area, not in life sciences. If your blog is full of analytics, new ideas and hypothesis - why not? make pdf of most prominent post and write how to cite it, don't forget about copyright - Alexey

Lars, you've exactly stated my feeling about the equity between "web presence" and "conference presence". It's all about the social side of being a scientist - and it's not at all necessary to being a good scientist, really, but exchange between peers is the oil that make the machine function smoothly. And I'm oddly drawn to it, anyhow. Like Henry said, I just wanna be loved... but to be cited on that, or even on serious back-of-napkin insights, seems just silly in that format. - Heather

an entry from Nature Network - Recent topics from Science Blogging 2008: London

Schedule Announced for Conference & Workshops on SOA, SaaS, Virtualisation & ECM (0 replies)

Sunday at 10:14 pm - Link

Maxine posted a link

London's dead. The party's over. - Mixed miscellanies - Scott Keir's blog on Nature Network

Sunday at 1:23 pm - via Bookmarklet - Link

;-) - Maxine via Bookmarklet

Yeah, sorry about that... we went to Cambridge: http://blog.openwetware.org/sc... - Egon Willighagen

Martin Fenner posted a link

London Science Tour in Pictures

August 29 at 10:44 pm - via Reshare - Link

mike seyfang and Matt Wood liked this