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Seb Paquet › Likes
A provocative post from @FirepoleMRKTNG asks when can we make withdrawals from the 'Bank of Social Capital' http://www.firepolemarketing.com/blog...
Seb Paquet liked this
The Power of the Marginal - http://www.paulgraham.com/margina...
Seb Paquet, Clark Kent and Alex Holcombe liked this
Paul Graham on why good ideas surprisingly often come from the margins, and why incumbents often have skewed incentives. "If I could go back and redo my twenties, that would be one thing I'd do more of: just try hacking things together. Like many people that age, I spent a lot of time worrying about what I should do. I also spent some time trying to build stuff. I should have spent less time worrying and more time building. If you're not sure what to do, make something."
- Michael Nielsen
Fight of the Century: Keynes vs. Hayek Round Two - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Yaroslav Nikolaev, Seb Paquet, ✔ ǝuǝƃnǝ and 2 other people liked this
This is amazing.
- Michael Nielsen
Peer Evaluation - http://www.peerevaluation.org/
Daniel Mietchen, Lambert Heller, Just Joe and Seb Paquet liked this
"Your research, your peers, your impact • Promote and enjoy real-time Open Access to research • Share primary data, working papers, books, media links... • Receive feedback and reviews from your peers • Expose your work to those that matter • Aggregate qualitative indicators about your impact • Drive, build and share your online reputation"
- Thomas Brox Røst
from Bookmarklet
PeerEvaluation looks really cool. Still buggy, though, such that not quite usable yet. My page: http://www.peerevaluation.org/profile...
- Heather Piwowar
Tried to sign in an hour ago but couldn't as I don't have an Institutional email address <sniffs>. Have applied for a 'waiver' though.....
- Graham Steel
They really need to fix that tall r. I know they're trying to be cute, but I read it as peef every time.
- Mr. Gunn
Graham: I gave it up for the same reason - no institutional e-mail. Eager to know waiver result. Discipline list also too traditional.
- Bill Anderson
from twhirl
So far, a lot of #pants - Have managed to create a page, no avatar options. #update I take that back. Having Skype'd with Aalam for 20 mins, things are well cool.
- Graham Steel
What are the Windows A: and B: drives used for? - http://superuser.com/questio...
Steve Koch, Mickey Kosloff, Kubke and 10 other people liked this
Awesome.
- Michael Nielsen
Cool!
- Egon Willighagen
feel old... feel very old!
- fred de masi
"So now you know what that Save icon represents." :-D Time for a new metaphor?
- Mr. Gunn
My thoughts, too, Mr. Gunn. Only, I noticed for the first time that in Ubuntu, the save icon has been changed to a down arrow overlayed on a hard disk (although in gVim, Save All is still a set of floppies). But even that's a bad idea, because how many users actually know what a hard disk looks like, until they ask, "What is that save icon a picture of?"
- Chris Lasher
Man I remember being excited when there was a second disc drive so you could both load software _and_ save files
- Cameron Neylon
I was trilled at having a tape drive, like those you can use to tape music too... then I had not to retype the software again and again :) (But fair, that was before DOS, and not called A:\)
- Egon Willighagen
Just after Christmas I was at a friend's place, and what did he have set up in his lounge room, but a working Commodore 64! Talk about a blast from the past...
- Michael Nielsen
The C64 was my first introduction to computers, as far back as I can remember.
- Mr. Gunn
I am making my dissertation writing completely open and based on my open notebook. Here's the first chapter. http://www.openwetware.org/wiki... This is in the rough draft stage but there is more to come.
Claudia Koltzenburg, Mike Chelen, Andrew Perry and 18 other people liked this
Another preview of the future of (mainstream) science, imo. Historians and sociologists and philosophers of science, please note and give due credit to such concrete-action early adopters.
- Bill Hooker
You kick a ton of ass, Andy!
- Steve Koch
Cool, Dude -- will be referring my thesis students to this, especially since I am using a class wiki for some of their work in a pseudo-ONS fashion. In fact, just sent them the link:-). Will also be a good case study for the relationship b/w science and writing which they are discovering is not such a one-to-one kind of thing.
- Mickey Schafer
Book manuscript sent to the publisher! Months more still to go before it appears, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel :-)
Heather Piwowar, Deepak Singh, Chad Orzel and 28 other people liked this
are we there yet? are we there yet?
- Christina Pikas
Just a little further...
- Michael Nielsen
I rarely buy books, but I will certianly be purchasing this one. Thanks for the update, Michael.
- Graham Steel
congrats! when do we get to read some excerpts ;-)
- Anthony Leverrier
Thanks, everyone :-)
- Michael Nielsen
Congrats! I can't wait to read it!
- Chris Granade
Much awesomeness.
- Dave Bacon
Very cool!
- damian pope
What are you doing next, Michael?
- Seb Paquet
Seb - Two things. One, I expect to do some travel, just to meet some people doing interesting stuff on the fringe. Second, I've been playing around with a bunch of goofy small projects, to see what seems most interesting. I have a short list of half a dozen (the long list is way too long) - those projects relate variously to open source search, open education, some ideas about ethics...
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- Michael Nielsen
... (cont) areas where I'd be interested in meeting people: people doing data mining in the social sciences; DIY bio; makers; wearable computing; any kind of radical urban design or architecture; space (especially open source space). Anyone have any other suggestions for areas with lots of interesting fringy stuff?
- Michael Nielsen
I've always liked Stewart Brand's quote: "I look at the edges to see where the center is going.".
- Michael Nielsen
More stuff: a big problem we don't know how to solve is knowing your city. Even if I lived in a tiny town, I'd expect to miss 90+% of the interesting events going on. And in a big city the problem is far worse. E.g., in Toronto a couple of weeks ago I discovered a new-to-me seminar series which, over the ensuing two weeks had the following people speak: Salman Rushdie, Simon WInchester,...
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- Michael Nielsen
Another area I think is fascinating is space-based solar energy. I'd like to understand what the limits and possibilities are. How large a capital investment would it take to supply the world's electricity needs?
- Michael Nielsen
Beginnings are fun times :-)
- Michael Nielsen
A good way of asking my question above: where is scenius happening right now? "Scenius" is Brian Eno's term for a place where the social environment is exceptionally creative (http://www.kk.org/thetech... ) Good examples would be Athens in the fifth century BCE, or Bloomsbury, or Silicon Valley. Where is it happening now?
- Michael Nielsen
Addendum to "where is scenius right now?" -- if the answer does not start with "www.", why not? Is there a way to create such a place online or does it have to be in meatspace?
- Bill Hooker
It's a nice idea to create such a place online. It's also quite a challenge - consider the billions of dollars that have been spent in failed attempts to create it offline. (Suggests that it can't be made to order.) As Kelly says in the article I linked, it seems to emerge in locations and at times that are unpredictable. As an empirical question, I'd be curious to know where those communities are today, and what they're doing? In Bangalore? Delhi? Somewhere else? Is it coming out of Ashoka?
- Michael Nielsen
Apropros attempts to create scenius: here's a photo from a center for innovation in downtown Toronto: http://www.flickr.com/photos... I am not encouraged. Almost the only thing you can see are the security systems on the doors...
- Michael Nielsen
At least one of the doors has a phone. You could talk to the person on the other side of the locked door and beg to be let in.
- John Dupuis
The website gives a rather different impression from that photo -- e.g. http://www.marsdd.com/aboutma... (I am strongly inclined to believe the photo more than the hype-laden website.)
- Bill Hooker
It'd be interesting if you walked into the Centre for Social Innovation at a random time and see what that looks like. The couple of times I've been there it's been pretty lively.
- John Dupuis
+1 on knowing the city. We should talk about this sometime. I hope you come to Montreal at some point. It's not that far :-)
- Seb Paquet
Do you have a ref for that Brand quote?
- Seb Paquet
Not offhand. Not 100% sure whether it was Brand or Minsky. I've heard one of them quote the other on it.
- Michael Nielsen
Anyone teaching an introductory quantum computing course in the spring? I'm preparing some (free) class materials that you might potentially find useful. If you're interested, leave a comment below, or send me a direct message.
Chris M, Seb Paquet, Clark Kent and 3 other people liked this
(That's very Northern-centric. It's Autumn in the Southern Hemisphere, of course! )
- Michael Nielsen
What about placing those materials at http://wikieducator.org/ or http://en.citizendium.org/wiki... ?
- Daniel Mietchen
Agree with Daniel - Seeing it on those platforms ould be great
- Kubke
The materials are designed for (and integrated with) a special non-wiki platform. It'll become a bit clearer when things are actually done...
- Michael Nielsen
The mismeasurement of science - http://michaelnielsen.org/blog...
Dan Hagon, Turkish Delight, Kaitlin Thaney and 25 other people liked this
An essay I wrote containing a few thoughts on the use and misuse of metrics in science.
- Michael Nielsen
Fantastic! Great info - and I thought I knew a thing or two about metrics...
- Björn Brembs
Thanks, Bjoern. Incidentally, I just Googled my title to see if it had been used before, and turned up this interesting article: http://www.dcscience.net/lawrenc... It seems familiar, and I presume I've skimmed it before; I may have unconsciously gotten the title there. (Consciously, my inspiration was Stephen Jay Gould's "The Mismeasurement of Man".)
- Michael Nielsen
Dorothea: thanks for the tip on the LaTeX, which I've now corrected.
- Michael Nielsen
On gaming: oh definitely, yes! That kind of gaming is very similar to internet spam, or (especially) SEO tactics - in some ways, even predates modern internet spam. I wish Google et al would release more of their research on how to automatically detect and defeat the spammers, it'd be very helpful in this context. (It's easy to see why they don't, though.)
- Michael Nielsen
On a related note, my friend Hassan Masum pointed out an amusing consequence of using YouTube video views as a factor: no doubt a very peculiar arms race would begin in the attractiveness of the presenters...
- Michael Nielsen
First mention of "Academic SEO" that I've ever seen: http://www.mendeley.com/blog...
- Michael Nielsen
Not the first I've seen. There was a paper on this some time back: http://www.mendeley.com/researc... That said, it's not like the impact factor isn't being gamed now, so criticisms about new metrics being exploitable are not really that useful.
- Mr. Gunn
Yes, I think I've seen the article you refer to. BTW, not that it's important, but Gould's book was entitled: "The Mismeasure of Man". Got the paperback at home, read it as an undergrad eons ago.
- Björn Brembs
I'm a Jonny-come-lately to this thread, as usual. It's a great essay, but what I thought was really interesting was this part: "I should perhaps mention my own prejudice about the evaluation of science, which is the probably not-very-controversial view that the best way to evaluate science is to ask a few knowledgeable, independent- and broad-minded people to take a really deep look at...
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- Sean Barrett
Apologies, my original version of that comment had paragraphs.
- Sean Barrett
@Sean -- "Learning about aspects of other peoples research can be a fun and sociable activity" -- indeed it can, and your points about (a) viewing that time as an investment and (b) how much time we already waste on metrics, are both well taken. The problem is recognition. There is no mechanism by which these activities can contribute to one's tenure dossier or next grant application,...
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- Bill Hooker
...and after a wait for the upload here are my slides from today at #stminno10 - "The Gatekeeper is dead!" http://www.slideshare.net/Cameron...
Seb Paquet, Yaroslav Nikolaev, Jean-Claude Bradley and 17 other people liked this
I'm guessing if it's '06 then it isn't on slideshare? But yes, I suspect a lot has changed but not perhaps so much has happened as a result of that change?
- Cameron Neylon
Oh yes....it is a rather nice comparison side by side isn't it. So much has changed, and so much has stayed the same...
- Cameron Neylon
Good slides! It nicely reflects much of what I have against isolated networks, like Nature Network, the new ACS thing, etc...
- Egon Willighagen
Just looked through the presentation and you absolutely nailed it.
- Nico Adams
This is exactly the message we need to get out to everyone!
- Björn Brembs
Thanks all. I think it went down reasonably well live, although I don't think it went as smoothly as it could because I lost time at the beginning. But there was some pretty positive responses from people afterwards and on twitter. There was video taken but not sure whether it will be made available.
- Cameron Neylon
Google Scholar's Dramatic Coverage Improvement Five Years after Debut - http://zotero.org/dltj...
Seb Paquet, Laura Norvig, Comics Forge and 17 other people liked this
Abstract: "This article reports a 2010 empirical study using a 2005 study as a base to compare Google Scholar's coverage of scholarly journals with commercial services. Through random samples of eight databases, the author finds that, as of 2010, Google Scholar covers 98 to 100 percent of scholarly journals from both publicly accessible Web contents and from subscription-based databases that Google Scholar partners with. In 2005 the coverage of the same databases ranged from 30 to 88 percent. The author explores de-duplication of search results by Google Scholar and discusses its impacts on searches and library resources. With the dramatic improvement of Google Scholar, the uniqueness and effectiveness of subscription-based abstracts and indexes have dramatically changed."
- Peter Murray
"the conclusion cannot be clearer: libraries can seriously consider cancelling a large number of subscription-based abstracts and indexes since their unique contents and value are rapidly evaporating."
- John Dupuis
I sorta predicted it in 2004. http://jdupuis.blogspot.com/2004...
- John Dupuis
well, sure you can cancel the journal index if it's only value is the link to the article. I predict some indexes will add more value and other services to keep themselves relevant. One good example now is SciVal, which mines Scopus data for profiles of research output and strengths. Of course some of them won't figure this out, or use certification requirements to stay in business, but otherwise that's my call.
- Elizabeth Brown
Unfortunately (or fortunately, I'm not sure), beancounters may regard the added value as de minimus, or at least not worth the $$. I'd never say I was happy to have been fired or that Eureka! disappeared, but the writing for most (not all) A&I non-full-text databases has been on the wall for a while.
- Walt Crawford
A good example of added value is SciFinder. It's hard to imagine chemists giving that one up any time soon. On the other hand, I'm sure there are lots of A&I companies out there who are really sweating. And if they're not, they should be.
- John Dupuis
+1 Dorothea
- Mr. Gunn
Something isn't making sense to me, and it's hard for me to put my finger on what it is. But if Google scholar is a threat to, say, the Modern Language Association International Bibliography, why would database providers let them crawl it? And the fact that it crawls JSTOR, Muse, or other full-text repositories is irrelevant since we need to subscribe to those to get the actual articles. Please help me figure out what I'm not understanding here.
- Your Neighbor Steve
I don't think it is crawling MLA directly, and I would bet that MLA is one database that it doesn't duplicate very well. Now, something like Library Lit from Wilson would be a different matter...
- Just Joe
Dorothea, not really. :) Since we have already decided that we need to keep some A&I services despite all the full text we already subscribe to, why would Google Scholar make any difference to that decision now? IOW, if searching JSTOR, Muse, etc. directly wasn't enough yesterday, why is searching a big honking amalgamation of it--Google Scholar--suddenly enough now?
- Your Neighbor Steve
It is covering like 98% of the current journal literature, but I wonder about the older journal volumes that have not been scanned in, and the obscure conference papers, and book chapters, and newspapers, and lots of other stuff that hasn't been digitized.
- Just Joe
Well, Joe, I don't think the question is "Is GS better than A&I Service X" but rather "Is GS better than X + $20K per year" or whatever. I suspect that services aimed at faculty and grad students will do better than ones aimed at undergrads if only for that reason. For ugrads, if it isn't online, it doesn't exist. For researchers, it's much less likely that one old, obscure document will be just as good as any other.
- John Dupuis
"For ugrads, if it isn't online, it doesn't exist." Tell that to the ILL office at my undergrad-only institution.
- Your Neighbor Steve
Steve, maybe because the big honking amalgamation gives people the illusion that they don't have to know anything or try very hard with their searches? PubMed is free, so we don't even have to worry about canceling it. If people find what they need via Google Scholar, that's fine with me. What I worry about is people with more serious questions (i.e., docs looking for clinical answers,...
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- Rachel Walden
Yes, that makes sense to me, Rachel.
- Your Neighbor Steve
Sure, Steve, I'm guilty of a gross over-simplification. On the other hand (and without actually being able to check...), I suspect that the trend over the long term is downward for ILL just like for print book circulation. My point is that ugrads have different research habits and timeframes to work with that are going to make them somewhat less likely to value a particular unique document as opposed to some other document which is not quite perfect but is more readily available.
- John Dupuis
John, your point is certainly valid. I just don't agree that it means that libraries who support undergrads are likely to think that Google Scholar is a good replacement for most A&I databases.
- Your Neighbor Steve
Perhaps this is too obvious to be worth saying, but while I'm still not ready to say that Google Scholar sill be a significant database killer, it is obvious to me that it is already a meta-search killer. A few years ago, licensing a meta-search tool and spending lots of time configuring and customizing it might have made sense. Now, it seems Quixotic at best.
- Your Neighbor Steve
A problem with GS at the moment (AFAIK) is that it has no API. I'm guessing this is part of the deal Google has cut with its sources. So doing anything with GS (like automatically constructing citation counts for a set of articles) is a screen-scraping job. Yuk. Also, unlike the others, we don't actually KNOW what the coverage is...
- Chris Rusbridge
BTW Happy, the ILL staff may be busy, but I'm guessing their counts are in tens, max hundreds per day. That's probably a couple of orders of magnitude down on GS use. I don't think it disturbs the generalism: if it isn't online, it doesn't exist (pretty much)...
- Chris Rusbridge
I know I'm being picky, but I did a GS search for the author, and found a "related article" citation (to an earlier article on a similar topic) from one T Roy of the Library Journal...
- Chris Rusbridge
And since I'm being *very* picky, I note with sadness that yet again this article by a librarian is toll access (US$38 to me). Not that the author had a huge amount of choice in library journals...
- Chris Rusbridge
seems like I went home right when the conversation got interesting... I think ILL will always be used, because overall the quality of a lot of scanned material is not that great. Plus many scholars need/want to see the physical object when they're researching a project. Our ILL activity is way up since more articles are being found through GS that we don't have, and we're a pretty...
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- Elizabeth Brown
"BTW Happy, the ILL staff may be busy, but I'm guessing their counts are in tens, max hundreds per day. That's probably a couple of orders of magnitude down on GS use. I don't think it disturbs the generalism: if it isn't online, it doesn't exist (pretty much)" That's sheer nonsense. It's like saying because our JSTOR numbers dwarf the numbers of our smaller, more specialized databases...
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- Your Neighbor Steve
There was a similar article a couple of years ago: Google Scholar’s Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study and that one is available: http://www.personal.psu.edu/jjm38...
- John Dupuis
And Steve, the fact that GS use dwarfs ILL is both relevant and irrelevant. On the one hand, connecting people with the documents they need is one of our vital missions. On the other, resources are limited and we have to design our services and build our collections within those constraints. I would argue that we're heading into an era where we'll be able to redeploy some (much?) of...
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- John Dupuis
OK, John. I'm still not buying that exactly, but I'm willing to listen. For my part, it's clear that I need to write about this at a somewhat greater length in my own space. For now I'll say that it's not the truism that undergrads feel that "if it isn't online, it doesn't exist" that bothers me; it's the implication that we should *accept* this attitude and let 'em eat Google Scholar that's driving me a bit nuts.
- Your Neighbor Steve
I agree with Steve on the last part there. Students need to be led to the view that they need to use all useful things, not just the easy to find things.
- Pete
Steve & Pete, I'm with you 100% on that one and have the IL scars to prove it. All I would say is that GS is just as valid a tool as any other for helping students find the right document for their needs. I mostly don't teach GS, I mostly teach more subject-specific databases but frankly for a lot of the subjects I teach GS is very comparable. As for the "if it isn't online it doesn't exist" attitude, I suspect it may be somewhat more likely for science people than for others.
- John Dupuis
Sure, to the extent that GS disrupts the A&I industry that's an opportunity for libraries to both save some money and teach & promote the tools that students want to use anyways.
- John Dupuis
'Librarians and faculty alike often assert that "all researchers use Google Scholar." Based on this study, this is essentially correct.' Good article from the latest ISTL on science researchers: http://www.istl.org/10-fall...
- John Dupuis
On the other hand: 'Not all traditional fee-based databases (e.g., Web of Science) and not all subject-specific article databases (e.g., PubMed), are in a "death spiral." '
- John Dupuis
The Shadow Scholar - http://chronicle.com/article...
Matthew Todd and Seb Paquet liked this
Interesting in many ways. In some sense the writer ("Dante") is getting paid to receive an education-through-Google. This point seems to have gone almost uncommented on, despite a huge number of comments - most of the commenters are focusing on the connection between credentials and learning, which while not uninteresting, seems like the less interesting part of this article.
- Michael Nielsen
Put another way, it's fascinating that someone can sit at home, and with access to the internet rapidly cook up graduate theses across many different areas. It's probably not great work, but still...
- Michael Nielsen
It is fascinating, but to me it's fascinating how much academic work is rhetoric, not research.
- Your Neighbor Steve
Good insight Michael! It seems like this arrangement is a kind of team play that has the effect of a wealth transfer - one player gets the credentials, the other gets money and learning. Everyone's happy in the end, except that the value of credentials gets ruined over the long term. I'd rather be the writer.
- Seb Paquet
Dorothea, I mean that if you can write like an academic over a sustained number of pages, that's probably enough to pass the master's thesis.
- Your Neighbor Steve
Seb: to try and boil this down even more, if you strip out the essays-for-hire context for this story completely, and asked a prof whether a drop-out could write several theses in a year, in different subject areas, using only their home internet connection, I suspect most profs would say it was impossible. They'd say that it required the social context a University provides, etc (i.e.,...
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- Michael Nielsen
Bleh. A morally indefensible job. He's a parasite, blaming the host for being vulnerable. Academia is vulnerable to this precisely because it is open, and there's a lot of freedom for the students to develop. If some students choose to subvert that, they are the ones that have to live with it.
- Matthew Todd
David Mermin - Wikiquote - http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki...
Seb Paquet, Alex Holcombe and Yaroslav Nikolaev liked this
"I am awaiting the day when people remember the fact that discovery does not work by deciding what you want and then discovering it."
- Michael Nielsen
A Farewell to Scienceblogs: the Changing Science Blogging Ecosystem http://scienceblogs.com/clock...
Seb Paquet, Martin Fenner, Cesar Sanchez and 23 other people liked this
read this wonderful post and made a comment. Bora, I support your decision, too much energy and passion came to this blog from your side, so it's understandable. See you on new URL!
- Danica Radovanovic
I should have guessed that you would write an epic-length post about this. :-) It will be interesting to see whether the science blogosphere condenses around a few large networks or if there is a return to more blogging on single-author blogs.
- John (bird whisperer)
Any thoughts on what this means for blogging in general?
- Todd Hoff
John, I also found the tension between magazine and blog and corporate vs independent interesting.
- Todd Hoff
Yes, that was interesting, as is the conflict between print and web in the media as whole. I was barely aware of Seed Magazine. I knew it existed, but I only read an article if one of the Sb bloggers linked it, and even then pretty rarely. I agree with Bora that the two could have been better integrated.
- John (bird whisperer)
I had been aware of some discontent within Sb even before the Pepsi blog incident, but I didn't know how deeply it ran.
- John (bird whisperer)
Sorry to see you are leaving Sb, but I will be reading your stuff wherever you land (No Huffington Post for you though?) As long as you feed whatever blog url into friendfeed or twitter, I will see it.
- Just Joe
Yup, I need to change all the feed piping everywhere - FF, Fb, etc. tomorrow morning probably.
- Bora Zivkovic
Lovely piece of writing, Bora. I teared up at the end. Sigh.
- Mickey Schafer
Citizen Science online?
Dan Hagon, Jim Craig, Pierre Lindenbaum and 15 other people liked this
Cameron is interested in FriendFeed examples: http://friendfeed.com/e...
- Bora Zivkovic
To submit an article here: http://jcom.sissa.it/call
- Bora Zivkovic
Is there an example of "citizen science" on FF? Not scientists collaborating, but non-scientists or amateur scientists pulling data about some aspect of nature together here?
- Bora Zivkovic
Related to that (and that can be a separate submission to the same issue of the journal), what are the online social networks that put together data collected by amateur scientists?
- Bora Zivkovic
I am aware of a few projects, for instance:
- Bora Zivkovic
Using Twitter to collect data on fish catch: http://scienceblogs.com/clock...
- Bora Zivkovic
There is GalaxyZoo: https://www.galaxyzoo.org/
- Bora Zivkovic
Then, The USA National Phenology Network: http://scienceblogs.com/clock...
- Bora Zivkovic
A number of naturalist sites http://scienceblogs.com/clock... including iNaturalist: http://inaturalist.org/
- Bora Zivkovic
Darwin Core: http://wiki.tdwg.org/twiki...
- Bora Zivkovic
Faunapolis: http://faunapolis.org/
- Bora Zivkovic
Scratchpads: http://scratchpads.eu/
- Bora Zivkovic
Are the Christmas Bird Count and Backyard Bird Count social: http://www.birdsource.org/
- Bora Zivkovic
Are the SETI data collected somewhere for everyone to see?
- Bora Zivkovic
any other examples?
- Bora Zivkovic
Wow - a great collection of projects here: http://www.thetakeaway.org/stories...
- Bora Zivkovic
Bluebells! http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-...
- Karen James
Metagenome Annotation Using a Distributed Grid of Undergraduate Students http://biology.plosjournals.org/perlser...
- Karen James
Nature's calendar http://www.naturescalendar.org.uk/
- Karen James
Stargazing, from all longitudes: http://www.globalpost.com/dispatc...
- Bora Zivkovic
Grassroots Science: An Article Wishlist For The Journal of Scientific Communication: http://www.scientificblogging.com/run_and...
- Bora Zivkovic
Bioweathermap Initiative: www.bioweathermap.org
- Jason Bobe
The eBiosphere Real-Time Citizen Science Challenge! http://spire.umbc.edu/ebio/
- Bora Zivkovic
I don't know if this is what you're looking for, but there's a DIY Biology google group that's pretty active.
- Mr. Gunn
Not sure if this is related to the one Karen posted (about 8 posts up): http://www.greatsunflower.org/ (Sunflower bee project) Also not sure if it's what you're looking for.
- Steve Koch
(It was linked on friendfeed a couple months ago.)
- Steve Koch
More on eBio: http://openresearch.sebpaquet.net/2009...
- Seb Paquet
The Twitter/fish-catch study has been published: http://scienceblogs.com/clock...
- Bora Zivkovic
Also, there was a session on Citizen Science at the Science Online London earlier today - does anyone have a good transcript/blogpost about that session?
- Bora Zivkovic
In a few weeks time, I'll be appearing as a guest on Science Hour with Dr Kiki http://www.kirstensanford.com/ to talk about citizen science. This to me seems like an appropriate thread on FF to mention during the show. I'll update the thread once a date has been formally scheduled for the show which like the last one http://is.gd/2UPZk, will be broadcast live on the web.
- Graham Steel
That is fantastic, Graham. Keep us posted.
- Bora Zivkovic
Open Dinosaur Project: http://opendino.wordpress.com/
- Jason Bobe
A FriendFeed group: http://friendfeed.com/citizen...
- Bora Zivkovic
Well spotted.
- Graham Steel
See www.scienceforcitizens.net to add a citizen science project or to volunteer for any of the (soon to be) thousands of existing citizen science projects in the online database.
- Darlene Cavalier
I'm looking for a non-affiliated site to be a repository my open courseware. However, there doesn't seem to be any of them. Any suggestions?
Seb Paquet liked this
@sebpaquet suggested @howardrheingold 's social media classroom, however, I'm looking for a place that is the open courseware equivalent of github. Independent, has a variety of topics (not just social media).
- Christopher Allen
Have you looked at Connexions? http://cnx.org/
- Seb Paquet
There might be OpenOCW too - http://openocw.ed.usu.edu/
- Seb Paquet
OK, think I hit paydirt. http://wikieducator.org/OER_Han...
- Seb Paquet
So, what did you pick?
- Seb Paquet
So FriendFeed's growth is flat, why do you think that is and how do you think that could be improved?
Fake Name, Nilesh, Seb Paquet and 26 other people liked this
It's a shame that FF is not growing yet has all better features over the likes of Twitter and Facebook but what is causing the lack of growth and what could be done to increase growth in FriendFeed?
- Kol Tregaskes
FF is too much work. Consumes time, needs a lot of effort and most people are happy with one-to-one than one-to many interactions. Twitter wins.
- vijay
FriendFeed fits in a space in between Twitter and Facebook. There is very little reason to join FF if you are already using both Twitter and FB.
- Daniel Sims
Is it down to 'missing' features? Is the poor introduction for new users to blame?
- Kol Tregaskes
Also what Daniel said.
- vijay
Daniel, I did. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Vijay, yeah it can be pretty complicated for the new user, how would you make is simpler?
- Kol Tregaskes
if you make it any simpler it becomes twitter. Only way to go is to get users to replace their Blogs with FF. I think that's what they are working towards.
- vijay
Vijay, you meant for writing your own blog articles? Yep, that would be great. All I'd really need it a few HTML options in the first comment to do this. Nothing too fancy. Then I could blog from FF, embed it on my site and everything is synced, comments and all. :-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Svartling, I've done the same thing also.
- Ashikur Rahman
I think what needs to be done is have a clear "walk-through" example of setting up one's full social media life on FriendFeed. It's a great box of toys for exploring and tinkering -- but trust me, new users will be quite daunted at first unless they have some hand-holding
- Ashikur Rahman
It only targets content producers
- Genaro Bardy
Ashikur, I see this all the time as I seek out new users to welcome them each day. A lot post their first entry as "what do I do now?". Once new users have completed the registration process they are put on friendfeed.com with no other explanation. A nice Flash anim is needed here to show the new user the basic features of the service.
- Kol Tregaskes
FF should go all the way and become a fully-featured Twitter client. People will join and stay for that, then eventually fall in love with FF. Right now, FF's integration with Twitter is just half-way done and causes more confusion.
- Daniel Sims
Make it a fully-featured Twitter client with better blogging functionality.
- Svartling
If I could import my non-FF Twitter friends, keep it refreshed if I unfollow them and swap them to FF users if they join, then I'd use FF as my Twitter client. But the likes of Seesmic Desktop provide all sorts of useful features like RT and tabs for replies for multiple Twitter accounts and DMs.
- Kol Tregaskes
FF requires more time to enjoy. Many of the features are probably difficult for new visitors to see or find. The interface may be overwhelming and it may be a bit too "Zen" in appearance for most people. People used to Twitter may find it harder to connect to others (they may find the lack of @ replies as a communication hurdle). The API isn't exploited as widely as Twitter's. Mobile...
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- phil baumann
FF hasn't gotten the buzz Twitter has. It's seems harder to find like minded people on FF. Maybe, I just don't know how to do it. I love the pictures and the ability to have real conversations. I hate 140 character rule of Twitter. Twitter more people are just talking. Not as many listeners. Lots of marketers and life coaches on Twitter. Don't like that. I like "rooms" on FF. I like...
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- Kimber Scott
Kimber, absolutely agree with you.
- Ashikur Rahman
What I dont like is to properly track watch my friends, I have to follow FF, twiter, and facebook.
- MikeDeal / ZoneDancer
Kimber, interesting points there. Twitter is definitely a broadcast tool whereas FF is a discussion tool.
- Kol Tregaskes
I have noticed with friends that FF requires some usage on the part of the individual, so it's a hard sell and steep learning curve that way. Most of my friends I introduce here see a relatively blank page, with just my posts. They're timid to subscribe, and thus see a really whitewashed space.
- anna sauce
Anna, agree about it being a hard-sell. I think the email features should be plugged more. I think there is a big market of users that I used to emails and know nothing about social media beyond Facebook. I'm trying to tempt a few friends onto FF via the email features, to them it's a matter of registration then emailing me to a different address. Eventually they may move onto the site and use all the regular features.
- Kol Tregaskes
I think FF is too much for people new to social media I don't know. I think the realtime thing kinda pushed a lot of people away as well. I'm finding myself finding more people I'd rather interact with on Twitter and Facebook than FF. Discussions are nice, but they are time consuming. For anyone with a job that doesn't allow them to be online, a family to take care, a house to take care...
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- Ⓐ ☠ slayerboy ☠ Ⓐ
I'd also like to see it pushed as a collaborative tool. It works really well in this sense. Businesses could use FF.
- Kol Tregaskes
Another thing that bothers me on FF is a user issue, but I think with some encouragement from FF is could be improved: There are too many blank profiles. People should be encouraged to say 'something.' It takes a lot of work to see if you want to follow somebody, if they have a blank profile. Also, private feeds are so off putting. I know they should be an option, but it's very hard to...
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- Kimber Scott
from email
Personally I like the rate of growth, after all a good wine needs time to reach its full potential.
- Kevin J Hatton
Heh, Kevin. I'm not after Twitter or FB like growth but any growth would be nice. ;-)
- Kol Tregaskes
Some of it is habit. And herding behavior. If their friends use it, then they want to. Maybe FF should be all about quality rather than quantity. I stepped through many people to help them start up. Showed them how to use the bookmarklet. None of them wanted to use it. It's a new technology in its own right. Sometimes peeps are just set in their ways?
- Marg Uerite
Peeps have to have a certain level of computer literacy sophistication, just to appreciate it!
- Marg Uerite
Kimber, the user settings page is presented to new users when they register but the description is only optional. I'd like to see an explanation of how and the benefits to why to fill in this be displayed with the tutorial.
- Kol Tregaskes
Kol, exactly what I was thinking - a little education will solve so many issues.
- Kimber Scott
from BuddyFeed
:-)
- Kol Tregaskes
FriendFeed needs to think through its use cases, & survey users for their preferences between them. Examples are FF as feed reader (needs a "Subscribe to this blog" bookmarklet), or the FF as Twitter client++ mentioned above by several people, which I'm also big on. Then, once decided, make it clear for new users through usage videos, UI "obviousness" improvements, etc. how it works....
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- Alex Schleber
the main reason why friendfeed doesnt catch fire is its lack of complete profiles...i cant search for people from munich,...or from my schools, etc, etc,... FAIL
- Chris Hofmann
Good point, Chris!
- Ashikur Rahman
from iPod
... and, why do I have to go all the way up to the start of a conversation to comment? Especially when it's a long one?
- Ashikur Rahman
from iPod
Chris makes a very good point and so does Ashikur. No complete profiles. On FB you can pretty much trust that the person is a real person by looking at the profile, you get a sense of community, you can find people you know, or used to know, etc., etc. Ashikur's point should be very easy to fix.
- Kimber Scott
from email
Mass media is driving twitter adoption nothing else.
- Geoff Schultz {TF}
Odd, isn't it. Traditional media pushing the latest "new media" trend.
- Jason Nunnelley
Having just switched over to using Friendfeed for all my social networking, I can say that making this a full-featured Twitter client would bring more people in. Once here they'd realize that's not what it's really about. But the halfway method that exists now is a major deterrent.
- John Robert Ladd
Kol, IMHO: 1) The barrier to entry increases with the character limit and inversely to the photo count. 2) Let's face it, the biggest differentiation from twitter is not comments (twitter has @ replies) or the better search (although, that's big) or attachments (twitter has 3rd parties for that) -- the differentiation is groups, yet the process of finding a group is still pretty awful (by searching - the results are cluttered at best) or non-obvious (by clicking on someone's subscribers and scrolling down).
- tollie williams
The easiest thing about FF is the aggregation. The harder elements at first are saved searches and building up new friends on FF. overcome these two harder elements and it should move better.
- George Hall (Australia)
from BuddyFeed
We all need to be hiding more people
- Charlie Anzman
biggest reason is publicity. no Oprah, no plusk. no MarkZ.
- MikeAmundsen
Better RSS reading-support would be great - I use FF instead of GReader now for simplicitiy but it's not ideal. Searchable profiles too. Searching by location would be great. I'd love to sub to more people in the UK, London or even locally in Kent but that's hard unless that stated they are from that place or join a local-based group.
- Kol Tregaskes
Ashikur, yeah little, basic things like that are still missing.
- Kol Tregaskes
For a "complete profile" what would you like to see included?
- Kol Tregaskes
Should FF should status updates, e.g. on our profiles?
- Kol Tregaskes
tollie, agree that group search results need a lot of work, what would you like to see on such searches? Number of subscribers, group description?
- Kol Tregaskes
George, how could FF overcome those two issues?
- Kol Tregaskes
Read FriendFeed Feedback, there's loads of ideas there...
- Marlin Forbes
Marlin, what suggestions have you seen in FF-Feedback that you think would help FF in growing?
- Kol Tregaskes
Kol, Re: improving group search. I think the Find groups page should look a lot like WeFollow.com, except where WeFollow has category titles, FF should be organizing the groups by "Most (subscribed/active) among (friends/everyone) (today/this week/this quarter/this year/all time)."
- tollie williams
(Yes, that's 2*2*5=20 possible groups. But you would design it to show 3 categories, with the switches I put in parenthesis as interface elements.)
- tollie williams
Oh, and I forgot to say: the text visible should be "subscribers", but clicking on the INFO button would reveal the group's description and an estimated activity count (similar to the new subscriber emails- "about 10 posts a day" eg).
- tollie williams
We don't tolerate trolls. Hence, flat.
- Steven Perez
Steve's point is most likely it. Trolls don't have an outlet here, which limits traffic to truely useful and entertaining content, rather than purely emotionally focused content. FF may have uncovered one of the core reasons for lack of traffic on any social site, in tandem with xkcd's "someone is wrong on the internet": users empowered to effectively ignore trolls limits rate of growth.
- Andy Bakun
from Android
Turn FriendFeed into an embedded comment system and information stream for websites. Make the fact that it's a widget less obvious, replace the commenting system of the host. Host the conversation outside of FF, and bring it back.
- Marlin Forbes
Post, Kimber added you as a friend on Goodreads. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, friends with Kimber. To confirm this friend request, follow the below link: http://www.goodreads.com/friend... &utm_medium=email&utm_source=invite - Kimber (kimberscott.art@gmail.com)
- ♣ ♣ ♣
from email
Interesting idea, Marlin.
- Kol Tregaskes
It's almost impossible to be a 'casual' friendfeed user. You either go all in and comment like crazy and spend A LOT of time reading and posting and being witty, and if you're really good you might start to get some subscribers. If you don't invest a lot of time, you don't get anything out of it and your feed sits in obscurity with very little social interaction and you wonder whats the...
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- veo
I agree with veo, and with anna http://friendfeed.com/friendf... it happened the same to me when I joined. I thought it was just another MyBlogLog.
- Friendfeed's Francisco
..which reminds me, ff needs to adopt @reply model to be more engaging. :/
- Friendfeed's Francisco
I think it just needs to be more traditional. Comments start out very compact in my monitor here. Very unlike a forum and has tinier fonts. The post also feels too grayed out. The rest could be improved by discovery. Related posts like blogs. Better integration of services. Finally better unification of comments from all the things it aggregates. For ex. Posterous really won me over...
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- Fake Name
@daveman692 re: buried in email: gmail's filters are your friend. Remember @cshirky "It's not information overload. It's filter failure."
Seb Paquet liked this
Academic Evolution: The Open Scholar - http://www.academicevolution.com/2009...
Peter Miller, Cameron Neylon, fundscience and 8 other people liked this
Apart from the existing, resisting structures I also still see a lack of easy to use solutions. And easy to use it has to be, because otherwise scientists will feel they waste some of their precious time. I for my part don't have the time and/or the knowledge to go out there and program a wiki with all the desired functionalities a modern electronic lab notebook has. Who does?
- Oliver Schuster
If you don't need sophisticated permission options a regular wiki is as simple to use as paper.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
We've been using a simple wiki as a lab notebook for 3 years and it has met all of our needs so far. Of course we link to other tools like Google Spreadsheets, JSpecView and ChemSpider but the core "notebook" functionality works extremely well. Yes, the PI and other stakeholders need to go in there and maintain order and comment but that won't disappear if you use any other tool.
- Jean-Claude Bradley
Well. I want first and foremost an interactive reaction scheme. At the moment it's a hassle. I dont want to export it from ChemDraw and find out it's wrong and then I have to do it again. And if I go through the hassle of drawing structures on the computer (which IS slowish) I want the molecular mass and sum formula calculated automatically. And if I change equivalents or mass or...
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- Oliver Schuster
Another thing is spectra, chromatograms and such. I dont want to export and upload them. Every analytic machine needs a client that makes the spectra available, e.g. by uploading to a central database or just by a webserver. And if you use the right identifier on all computers, the notebook will we updated and interlinked automatically: "6:36 *** 13C-NMR recorded". THEN we would be talking. At the moment it's just faster to print everything and stack it in piles on my desk.
- Oliver Schuster
If you are interested in automatic lookup of MW, density and related calculations to plan chemistry experiments I think calling web services from within Google Spreadsheets (or whatever you prefer) is a versatile way to go. Rajarshi Guha built these for us in the past (see http://rguha.wordpress.com/2008... and the spreadsheet image at...
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- Jean-Claude Bradley
Concerning streamlining spectra, you can do much better than paper already without any automation at all. My students simply export their NMR spectra to the open JCAMP-DX format and drop them in a folder on our server running the OS JSpecView. That lets us expand and integrate any regions without losing resolution at any point in the future - and no paper. Plus we have web services can...
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- Jean-Claude Bradley
Traditional scholars are open minded but encounter communication and collaboration limits. Printed articles were embraced because they help address these issues, and digital formats hold the same promise.
- Mike Chelen
update: Rajarshi has just updated the chemistry info spreadsheet web services http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc... Just type the common name for the chemical and the number of millimoles and it gives you mg and if possible microliters
- Jean-Claude Bradley
I do see that all this is possible in principle, but it is far from easy. And my point was that as long as it's not easy, people won't do it. Concerning the spectra, it does not help if NMR works easyish but the rest of my data still needs fiddling around. It's all or nothing! I feel like I am in need for as many computer science students as chemistry students...
- Oliver Schuster
Thanks for the spreadsheet, Rajarshi!
- Oliver Schuster
Until there is a distributed social interchange protocol which allows us to have a local client tool taking a backup of all our interactions, we will have this uncertainty that our writings and interactions can vanish overnight, with bad luck, bankrupcies or whatever.
Ahsan Ali, James Furlo, Maitani and 17 other people liked this
i have no control over my comments in friendfeed, if someone deletes their main post my comments vanish
- Iphigenie
sites I bookmark can of course disappear - some bookmarking systems say they take cache copies (diigo, yahoo, others?), but it is not systematic, and I have no control over their policy. After lycos' tripod went offline, i found out that diigo had not taken cache copies of those pages I had bookmarked.
- Iphigenie
Have you checked out http://activitystrea.ms, Joelle?
- Ken Sheppardson
some of the things I wrote in friendfeed I always intended to go back, take out and craft into a post. Now I notice it is near impossible to find them again, and of course if friendfeed goes away...
- Iphigenie
ken: no I hadn't - enlighten us :)
- Iphigenie
Chris Messina does a much better job of explaining it than I can :-) http://factoryjoe.com/blog...
- Ken Sheppardson
ok, you're off the hook!
- Iphigenie
I think my comments actually get backed up by backtype, though I'm not sure. I'm gonna check. Yes, checkout my profile here: http://www.backtype.com/meryn
- Meryn Stol
webapps are going to have to be a lot more clear about their retention policies, their exit paths for data
- Iphigenie
From last June -- "By marking up social activities and social objects, delivered in standard feeds with microformats, I think we enable anyone to run a FriendFeed-like service that innovates and offers value based on how well it understands what’s going on and what’s relevant, rather than on its compatibility with any and every service." http://factoryjoe.com/blog...
- Ken Sheppardson
...so true. it would be nice to have a desktop app that could manage this.
- .LAG liked that
Ken ...cool. that's good knowledge.
- .LAG liked that
I'm wondering whether friendfeed would authorize a respectful app which uses their API to do a trickle backup of foaf information as well as some form of feed backup - although as far as I see it it is only a small amount of my interactions I really want to mark up for future safekeeping, rather than the whole thing. Shouldnt be too hard to do on top of their python library. Not sure...
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- Iphigenie
ah, it's loosely realted to DiSo then - not heard anything on the Diso front for so long! That is exactly the kind of approach needed - DiSo, Wave, OpenID, OpenSocial - overlapping pieces out of which the right ecosystem might develop
- Iphigenie
Yup
- Ken Sheppardson
Pubsub would work well as a channel over which to suck our data out. Everything we do could be pubbed and a backup service could sub for it and store it away. Though the data lacks something without the richness of the UI interpreting it.
- Todd Hoff
Joelle, DISO hasn't got much momentum as of yet. People are to spoiled with centralized services. Maybe now, its spirit comes back - perhaps under another name. (openff?)
- Meryn Stol
Todd, the UI isn't rocket science. The hardest problem is having fast communication between the various nodes.
- Meryn Stol
I guess that's why Joelle said interchange protocol. Otherwise there's no definition for things like likes, posts, comment threads, profiles, URL shortener services, images, etc etc.
- Todd Hoff
I'd say users are way to accustomed to thinking of "services" as a web UI on top of a local data store. The current approach, i.e. "The service you liked went away and you can't use the UI you're familiar with to access some set of data? Oh well, time to learn a new UI and move the data" needs to get shaken up a bit. I should be able to pick/develop whatever method of creating and viewing data works best for the way I think, and access whatever content I have rights to.
- Ken Sheppardson
Perhaps we need to go back to thinking of "clients" on top of data caches, even if the "client" is a web app. Seesmic is a good example here: a web-based client that sits on top of a Twitter+Facebook data cache.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, yes. But in the end, the best data cache is a distributed one I think. The first step to get massive adoption for a new piece of software is to make it actually compatible with the existing Twitter and FriendFeed networks of course. You don't want to wait for organic growth. FF didn't grow that well organically either. Especially full Twitter compatibility is important for broad adoption.
- Meryn Stol
I'm thinking of a "cache" more like the literal local cache behind your web brower that stores content you've already seen... or pre-loads content you're about to view... the purpose of which is simply to improve the efficiency (i.e. reduce latency) of the client. As with the browser, the real "data store" is the web itself, but instead of dealing with HTML files, we're slinging around little XML snippets and JSON objects.
- Ken Sheppardson
Ken, you say "Seesmic is a good example here: a web-based client that sits on top of a Twitter+Facebook data cache." - How did you mean that then? You mean they have some data abstraction layer above the Twitter and Facebook API? A kind of abstraction layer makes sense. For such a big service, of course it makes sense to cache data they have taken from Twitter or Facebook. Ideally, clients that runs on the same server would have access to the same local cache.
- Meryn Stol
I meant cache of Twitter+Facebook data, sorry. What'd be slick is a system of connectors of sorts that take data via each system's native API (i.e. tweets, Facebook status updates, comments on FF or Google Reader), translates them into a standard format (e.g. activitystrea.ms) and dumps them into some big web-wide, federated pool. Fan it out via pubsub, let nodes filter stuff out and present it in whatever format the users of that nodes wants to present.
- Ken Sheppardson
I like your thinking Ken. Indeed, we need to work towards something like you describe. One world, many different "views", ways of interacting. Actually a bit like the MVC philosophy I'd say. Model contains all social data, views are the clients. Controller makes sure the clients can update the model and vice-versa. But, you have to translate it to web technologies... Easier said than done. :)
- Meryn Stol
open standards, distributed nodes, interoperable and agnostic front ends and back ends - you called me idealist for outlining this, and now you're there yourself :D Of course it presents a problem - I have a bias against bandwagons, a natural "once something is getting dominant value and quality get lost in the rush" type mistrust. What do I do when this one becomes a bandwagon, jump off like I have always done or try to play along?
- Iphigenie
That's quite a big question Joelle. Maybe discuss in some other thread?
- Meryn Stol
"open standards, distributed nodes, interoperable and agnostic front ends and back ends" -- in other words, email ;-)
- Ken Sheppardson
kind of, but updated for the real time, semantic, multi media, asymmetric, group sharing world (email standards are monsters and nearly nothing implements them correctly, lets stay away from that kind of muddle!)
- Iphigenie
geeky puns are the win!
- Iphigenie
Email is really just as real-time. The path looks like: sending MUA → MSA → sending MTA → receiving MTA → MDA → Mailstore for retrieval by MUA. In practice since these functions are often collapsed, it's really the same path as any other message.
- Todd Hoff
it is time to start work on reliable/robust "home server" aka extended NAS - to carry on that job without reliance on 3rd party service
- A. T.
email as service? with 78% of email traffic being spam? what you were smoking recently, guys?
- A. T.
There are things in the email architecture that are interesting, that was all. Just like the NNTP or jabber XCCD or irc - how they deal with a loose confederation of nodes, deal with some being offline at times, deal with "catching up" when a node comes back up, and how it still feels like one service at the top (most people assume their email and their friends' email are one service)
- Iphigenie
most every respectful service has an RSS/Atom feed. a custom feed retriever + a VCS should store everything you and your friends do, in the sequence they are doing it. in more stubborn cases, the retriever might parse raw html to scavenge bits not coming to the RSS. this all may run on your home machine or on a trusted third-party server. then, backup your VCS repository offsite, encrypted, and you're all set. time to recollect how often do you read your logs 5 or 10 years old. (I do this once in a while.)
- 9000
Run your own Usenet server?
- Bruce Lewis
Also, if you started or answered a thread in Friendfeed, there seems to be not a way to get updated via email - like if somebody answered your post.
- TrafficBug
@trafficbug check settings->notifications
- Michael Bravo
from IM
recursion - Google Search - http://www.google.com/search...
Seb Paquet and Michael Nielsen liked this
Science 2.0: What every scientist needs to know about how the web is changing the way they work - http://scienceblogs.com/confess...
Seb Paquet, Brian Krueger - LabSpaces, Jean-Claude Bradley and 12 other people liked this
Sadly, I'll be hundreds of kilometers away at the cottage we rent during the summer. Wait, that's happily, not sadly. Anyway, it's just not going to work out.
- John Dupuis
[Pssst. Dorothea? You are probably not helping. ;) ]
- Your Neighbor Steve
Well, the whole staying married incentive is helping me come to terms with it ;-)
- John Dupuis
Um, sorry to do this, but it really should be a lot of fun. Fuhgedabout the speakers (who is this Nielsen guy, anyway?), the audience already signed up is absolutely awesome, too - http://science20.eventbrite.com/. Starting to get the unconference itch. Sorry you won't be there, although I guess that if the cottage calls.. :-)
- Michael Nielsen
No worries, Michael. I'd love to be there but sometimes the timing doesn't work. Of course, one of the fun parts of my summer vacation is spending a few days at the World SF Convention in Montreal, which will be a blast. BTW, none of the names look familiar -- are there any York people registered? I'll send something to the science faculty listserv and hopefully it'll get some interest.
- John Dupuis
Haven't noticed any York people. It'd be great if you could send it to the list. There are a bunch of SciBarCampers (Mark Tovey, Paul Bloore, Jamie McQuay, Robin Blume-Kohout and more) who you probably know.
- Michael Nielsen
How do people find Google Docs?
Mike Chelen, Ricardo Vidal, Seb Paquet and 14 other people liked this
I've only fooled around with it on test files, but am considering using it for a large project. Anybody have any major gotchas to report? Or does it work well?
- Michael Nielsen
I really like it. I use it almost exclusively for word processing, although I haven't used it for a large project yet. Detailed formatting can be a bit wonky and largish files can be slow to load. The sharing and collaborative features also work very well.
- John Dupuis
Thanks, John. How large can the files get before you start to notice the speed?
- Michael Nielsen
Install Gears so you can have offline access too.
- pn
Neil: heh. (And thanks for the comments, they're very helpful!) The spectrum of opinions on Docs online seems to range from utter hatred to thinking Docs is the greatest invention in the history of humanity. Tough work slogging through that.
- Michael Nielsen
Paulo - Thanks for the suggestion. I'll hold off a bit, and try it out online first, to see what I think, and then install Gears if it works well. I must admit I'd be happier having local control over my data.
- Michael Nielsen
I am using for grant writing and people are liking it. Of course it lacks a lot of features but it can be a good start for collaborative work.
- pn
Michael, I've only seen it be slow on large spreadsheets -- maybe several hundred rows. As for lack of feature, yeah, it's pretty minimalistic that way. However, they did just add a bare-bones footnote feature which I haven't had a chance to play with yet.
- John Dupuis
Very nice to get an initial draft of a multi-person paper or grant going - in the end it needs to go out to Word to get formating etc correct. If only they could include bib mgmt via Google
- Rajarshi Guha
On the feature issue: I'm happy enough (for now) with a pretty minimal feature set. My testing shows it's got most of what I need, although the lack of bibliography management will be a bit of a pain. I'll give it a real go.
- Michael Nielsen
Thankyou, everyone, for the feedback. I put this up 28 minutes (!) ago, figuring I'd go to bed, and with luck a few people would comment by morning. Little did I know :-) So thankyou all - I'm going to head off to bed in a few minutes, but if anyone has more comments, I'll read and reply in the morning. Cheers!
- Michael Nielsen
Like said above, very useful to collaborate with, my wife and I organized our wedding basically using google docs. Only downside is when you need proper formatting for printing. If you are happy with rough formatting, that's fine, but precision printing (like address labels) is very hard, much better to export to word or excel.
- Nick Boucart
agree with what everyone else has said. Just to add it seems to scale well to large numbers of authors in a way that wikis do not - at least with simultaneous editing. In my experience tech phobic people prefer it to wikis but formatting has to be done elsewhere. Bibliography is a major weakness
- Cameron Neylon
from fftogo
I've only used it for small things where I want my doc in the cloud.
- Richard Akerman
Thanks for all the extra comments, especially the comments on how it compares to wikis, and the limitations with formatting.
- Michael Nielsen
Kambiz - That's a really interesting idea, which I may play with. How well do you find it works with large documents?
- Michael Nielsen
Spreadsheets are nice but not for massive datasets - the formatting issue for the text docs is annoying and puzzling as to why it hasn't been solved - also strange that GoogleDocs don't tend to show up on Google searches
- Jean-Claude Bradley
using Gdocs last 2 years, can't live without it today, amazing tool, but Presentations part still bad tho
- Alexey
I've only used the forms part to develop a survey. The forms feature is extremely limited. No edit after submission, no complex field types, no skinning, editing the form rearranges fields etc. But it does have nice features for doing stuff with the data once collected, so it's a tradeoff.
- Todd Hoff
I have been using it to draft papers, and bibliography works fine if you use BibTeX and have different documents for the .tex and the .bib files. Problem for some collaborators (and for chasing bugs introduced by them): TeX syntax highlighting is not available, and compiling has to be done offline.
- Daniel Mietchen
I have a comment on the presentation module -- I first used it about a year ago for a fairly important presentation that I was collaborating on with someone from the other side of the continent. The collaborative parts worked very well, but the presentation module itself was barely adequate for even a simple presentation. They have improved it quite a bit since then including being able to export to PowerPoint format.
- John Dupuis
I have used to collaborate on draft documents. It works much better than emailing around a copy of a document to different authors. The problem is usually more getting other people to use it. The spreadsheets are not useful enough for what I need. The presentations app is nice but so far I use it mostly to hold backup copies of presentations in case all else fails.
- Pedro Beltrao
John - Does the presentation module support basic animations? I'd be pretty tempted to try a collaborative presentation, which I've never done before.
- Michael Nielsen
Michael. I recently blogged about my in context usage of Google Docs here:- http://mcblawg.blogspot.com/2008...
- Graham Steel
Thanks for the pointer, Graham. I've got about a thousand unread blogposts in Google Reader, and I guess yours is in that batch...
- Michael Nielsen
I have used Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets for a large collaboration on a book, with five authors. The book was done in LaTeX with BibTeX, so compiling the files had to be done on a local machine. However, the ease of simultaneous editing by many people was very useful. Also very useful for us was the addition of the "upload-and-share--PDF" feature to Google Docs, which happened near the end of our project. I used this feature to upload the compiled document to share with all coauthors.
- Dimitrios Diamantaras
Google Docs is a better notepad than Yahoo Notepad, plus is helpful in data spreadsheets that go everywhere.
- Mike Reynolds
Dimitrios - it's very helpful to know it can be used for a very large project like that.
- Michael Nielsen
More: we also used Google Spreadsheets to do a collaborative proofreading exercise, for which Spreadsheets was fine. I can suggest zoho.com as an alternative, with even more features, such as a graphical front-end for equations, which then runs LaTeX on the server that makes a beautiful equation graphic. It is a graphic, though, and its alignment with text presents problems. I have not checked out bib management on Google Docs or Zoho, as I don't need it.
- Dimitrios Diamantaras
They did just implement something called "incremental reveal" but AFAIK nothing beyond that.
- John Dupuis
Yet one more note: we also used a wiki in the early stages of the project, and kept using it for activity updates. However, had we started on Google Docs from the beginning, there would have been little reason to use a wiki.
- Dimitrios Diamantaras
Oh yes, if you post a PDF file with more than 100 pages, Google Docs will only display the first 100. However, if you share it, those you share it with will be able to download the whole file.
- Dimitrios Diamantaras
Very irritating. I use it mainly because I have no better option. Printing is a poorly-integrated joke, I can't get the stupid thing to write in one font, and Google Gears never quite works right with it.
- i80and
I see Google Docs as a gateway drug to wikis. I felt the word processor starting to slow down around 10k words. My main beef with it is that while my kids use it routinely, several of my colleagues apparently can't figure it out. But I've used it successfully with several clueful collaborators. The Table of Contents feature rulez.
- Seb Paquet
For small informal text docs it seems to work reasonably well. There's a limit on the length / size of individual documents, which can be a pain if you're writing something big. 'help' tells you the details. Also, if you export to WORD you get a bunch of embedded styles that are tricky to get rid of. Collaborative editing of spreadsheets whilst on the phone trying to agree budget details for proposals works effectively.
- hardisty
I rather like the non-fancy look of simple programs like this. If I can only write in arial with minimal formatting, I tend to focus on what I'm saying more than if I have formatted the text to look fancy. Once colleagues and I are happy with the words, then export to Word and prettify. Used it to write the main text of several grant apps in recent months, including Bjoern's. Insertion of pictures is the only annoying thing that came up - has to be of specific formats and small-ish.
- Matthew Todd
I've found it easier to move the docs to Word by exporting to RTF. Etherpad.com has to be mentioned in this thread; it's useful for people who want up-to-the-second sync between editors.
- Seb Paquet
I use GDocs quite a bit. As Pedro said it's great to do collaborative work but usually that hard part is getting the collaborators on board with the idea. The spreadsheets are OK, but anything a little more complex and it becomes a bit of an ordeal to work with. Specially with very large and complex spreadsheets that pan over multiple sheets. Although I love the graphs :-)
- Ricardo Vidal
Spreadsheet features are useful when pulling XML or CSV data from other websites, and for making the results easily accessible online in multiple formats. Performance suffers relative to standalone programs, although FF 3.5 and Chrome help a bit.
- Mike Chelen
Recently coauthored a paper using Google Docs: http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.0910
- Daniel Lemire
I use Docs as my lab notebook. Of course, I also back up all my docs to my hard drive with a nightly script. As I've said before, use the cloud, love the cloud, just don't trust the cloud.
- Chris Miller
I like Google Docs mainly because of the integration with Gmail. I use it for reading Microsoft Word .doc email attachments. Reading in Google docs is just one click away and is much simpler than downloading the attachment. As a Mac user with no Microsoft products installed it is a godsend, as I no longer have to send annoying emails to people reminding them to send .rtf, .pdf or plain...
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- Matt Leifer
Same here, Matt, though I write collaborative TeX documents in Google Docs, too.
- Daniel Mietchen
Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted? - http://michaelnielsen.org/blog...
Seb Paquet, Pedro Beltrao, Anders Norgaard and 22 other people liked this
Essay based on a talk I gave on June 11, 2009, at the American Physical Society Editorial Offices. The one-word abridgement: "Yes".
- Michael Nielsen
Why the teasing then? ;)
- Meryn Stol
Extremely interesting article, Michael. Three thoughts: 1) You mention poor execution - this is important. There can be a communication breakdown between programmers and scientists - scientists are generally not tech-savvy and don't understand the tools being provided for them, and may be unwilling to spend time designing tools when they should be doing something else. There needs to be...
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- Matthew Todd
"If a person inside an industry needs to frequently explain why it’s not dead, they’re almost certainly wrong."
- Jodi Schneider
Mattew - on point 1, absolutely. On point 2, it's a really interesting question. I think you can break it up into two parts. There's the immediate economic question: in our society, with our current legal and governmental setup, what's going to happen to the news? That's a purely factual question, devoid of values, and it's the question my essay addresses. But there's a normative...
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- Michael Nielsen
It certainly looks little different in life sciences, where dynamics of the change is mainly directed by funding bodies (and their requirements to publish in Nature instead of PLoS One), not technological advancement. For that reason I'm also not sure how examples from media industry can be applied to science - if NYT editors were NIH grant reviewers, TechCrunch at some point would stop getting grants, right? So, any news whether and how science funding industry is about to be disrupted? :)
- Pawel Szczesny
Great essay! One comment: I don't think there is a general feeling that companies fail _because_ they are evil. There may be a feeling that companies _are evil while they fail_. Most people can see that OpenAccess is globally much better for science and society. But the local business decisions of Toll Access companies are at odds with the global good. That alone is bad. And TA companies then try to delay their decline with dishonest PR campaigns like PRISM that is even worse. Right?
- Anders Norgaard
Agree it's a great essay. You didn't mention anything about publications semantically linked to the primary data, workflows, evidence they are based on. This seems to be an area attracting lots of interest in several disciplines.
- hardisty
Google Insights for Search - http://www.google.com/insight...
joergkurtwegner, Seb Paquet, Richard Akerman and 2 other people liked this
"With Google Insights for Search, you can compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. See examples of how you can use Google Insights for Search."
- Michael Nielsen
WJW Fox 8 Cleveland does a ridiculous story on a bear in a lady's backyard - http://www.youtube.com/watch...
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Seb Paquet liked this
yo everybody is mocking this segment, but, COME ON, IT IS AMAZING. i watch my local tv news as much as possible in the hopes of stumbling on something half as great as this. WJW Fox 8 FTW.
- Zach Seward
Has anyone ever written a History of Collaboration?
Cesar Sanchez, Seb Paquet, Michael Nielsen and 3 other people liked this
I think there is quite a large literature in social sciences on this but I don't know anything much about it or who would.
- Cameron Neylon
when you say history - do you mean in general, in science, or in computer mediated communication?
- Christina Pikas
There's a very short summary, plus prospective by Saveri, Rheingold and Vian at http://www.rheingold.com/coopera...
- Seb Paquet
and a fragmentary timeline of social software on the Many-to-Many wiki at http://www.socialtext.net/m2m...
- Seb Paquet
Nice links Seb. I was thinking actually less of the computer-mediated emphasis, and more on the story of how people have worked together to solve problems. Naturally the modern age part would be concerned with technical developments. But how did people in Ancient Greece collaborate? How did people work together to siege castles - i.e. the planning and the execution? How did people publish collaborative science in the 18th Century? etc.
- Matthew Todd
Yeah, I thought so. I think a lot of it boils down to what we would call today info sharing, deliberation and decision-making practices. If you do find such a history, please share! The closest I can think of is Bloom's Global Brain - http://www.amazon.com/exec...
- Seb Paquet
you get great support when you bitch about a product on Twitter. So why should you ever use a hidden/private support forum?
Seb Paquet liked this
Wish that was always true. Ever tried to twitter your way into a response from Native Instruments' support? Terrible on every platform.
- Mike Baker
LOL! Well, ok, some companies excel at bad service. But it's always better for the consumer to have the conversation in public, especially in a searchable service.
- Lucas Gonze
The open, social web | FactoryCity - http://factoryjoe.com/blog...
Seb Paquet, Meryn Stol, Peter Hoffmann and Daniel Mietchen liked this
"a few concepts [...] necessary to defeat monopolies in social networks and cloud-based markets: data portability: related to switching costs; an example of this is phone number portability (which require government intervention to achieve); multi-homing: increasing reliability through parallelization; the example I used was ping.fm, which allows you to publish content simultaneously to multiple destinations, thereby defeating network exclusivity and lock-in; roaming: have access to and using other people’s networks; I showed a text message that I received from AT&T explaining how they wanted to charge me $20/MB while roaming in Europe. Clearly networks don’t like it when their customers roam! disaggregation: service substitutability; in this case the photo-editing service Picnik imports photos from a multitude of sources, avoiding tightly coupling itself an any one particular service, unlike Facebook’s photo-sharing service, which can only be used and accessed on facebook.com."
- Michael Nielsen
Nathaniel is give 'em what they need, dressed up as what they think they want.
Seb Paquet liked this
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