"Our mission To support and celebrate researcher’s lives at the bench in order to make research a better career for current and future generations of scientists." - Shirley Wu from Bookmarklet

A bit of stack overflow mixed with a bit of openwetware/JoVE? But not clear that you get karma for posting protocols as are keeping accounts for blog commenting separate from more sciencey stuff to enable anonymity. Interesting to see how that works out. - Cameron Neylon

It's not clear to many people how we might get karma from posting and commenting on FriendFeed or on blogs, but clearly a lot of networking and reputation building is going on here. And hopefully more and more people will find posting video/blogs/tips natural as time goes on. - Shirley Wu

I was thinking more that there appears to be an explicit karma mechanism for the blog posts and commenting but this doesn't flow into the protocols which seems to be missing a trick. This seems to be a result of being focussed on enabling anonymity and I'd be interested to know where that came from - my choice would have been to cope without (or with reduced) anonymity because of the value that would come from combining rewarding both thoughtful commentary and useful methods... - Cameron Neylon

Hey guys, thanks for the comments! Cameron, you are correct that we've intentionally split the blog section from the protocols. Videos, video comments and product comments will all be linked to your BenchFly profile. I completely understand your thoughts about disconnecting the blog and rest of site, but we felt it was important to keep them separate because we intend to discuss many topics that may not be very comfortable, but need to be talked about. In my own experience, and in talking to people about some of the topics we'd like to discuss, many people (particularly those higher up the food chain...) are very hesitant to say what they really think if there's a chance it might get back to their labmates, colleagues, boss, etc. Since we really want people to use their real names in their BenchFly profiles, we decided a good solution would be to give the user the option to make the blog anonymous. While I do understand it's an extra step, they could set up their intensedebate account with their own name if they want comments traced back to them. Thanks again for the feedback - I truly appreciate it! (So sorry for the long post...) - Alan Marnett

Alan, good point. My suggestion would be to make a bit more of the fact that people _can_ link the two accounts together if they want to get credit from one on the other. You've made much of the ability to split them but perhaps there are some good balancing arguments for people to _choose_ to put them together. I understand the concerns. My gut feeling is that you may lose more in terms of encouraging quality across the site than you gain in terms of honesty (in as much as people who are worried really still ought to be worried). But I will be very interested to see how it works out. Good luck! - Cameron Neylon