The del.icio.us notes feature got a lot more useful because of Friendfeed. My del.icio.us notes finally have people to read them. So when I tag now, I tend to add commentary about the link for my subscribers here on Friendfeed. Smarter bookmarking. I also have several "conventions" that I use del.icio.us tags for. - Brian Daniel Eisenberg

very much so. Yahoo had an early lock on social search. But then they just couldn't put the pieces together. Amazing to me really. - Thomas Hawk

The key seems to be, giving readers the ability to add meta info to a submission and then discuss that info, rather than just the submitter adding info like del.icio.us does. (edited for clarity) - Paul Short

I've always used the notes, partly just for myself, but also because I have pulled a feed from my bookmarks into my websites for a long long time now. I'm having more "fun" thinking about how to use Friendfeed better. - Laura Scott via Alert Thingy

Two questions 1) FriendFeed is basically for the short-term. --- liked a lot (with a little sadness) On the flip-side, should FriendFeed offer an option to categorize and save links and just crush Delicious to bits? 2) "save links / saves" - is that not "share something" ? --- - Kishore Balakrishnan

just another quotient of luck & timing ... & investor patience ... who owns the user-generated meta-data? kinda like who owns fan supplied data on pearl jam's ten.net ... just extended into other forums/granularities of interest (bandwidth) - Scott Moskowitz

I agree w/ Thomas Hawk - Y! couldn't put the pieces together. However, on the flip side, FriendFeed does not really have any pieces -- so will I really use this as my primary bookmarking tool or photo sharing service after I have 4,000+ bookmarks on delicious and 1500+ photos on Flickr? - Rex Hammock

Delicious has survived storms and even when Yahoo is not looking so good in business right now, I will hold my delicious account and of course keep pouring more info on Friendfeed... - TonNet

Agree with Kevin. Not sure about Peter. This is why remote controls have 57 buttons. - Chris White

Wwwwwwwwwhhhhhhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!! - Robert Scoble

Yup! Yahoo experimented with a new interface and got the "New Coke" effect. People wanted the old interface, and Yahoo switched back. Some VCs recommend that only building your user base to 2,000-5,000 users while are experimenting with interfaces. It's too painful to switch with larger user bases. - Mitchell Tsai

Mitchell, this isn't exactly the same thing. I would describe the feature problem as "feature creep." The other problem is just resistance to change. Inside a company, there is actually lots of pressure to change the user experience, but little lobbying for removing features. This is a big problem for a product designer that wants to provide an elegantly simple interface. - Chris White

A large part of the cause of feature creep is resistance to change. You can argue that adding new features is also change, but adding a new feature has a relatively small marginal cost for existing users. Most can ignore the new feature, or learn how to use it when they are ready. Removing a feature has a very large impact on every single user that uses that feature, however, as they are forced to adapt. - Laurence Gonsalves

As an aside, all this talk of resisting change reminded me of the story about eBay's background color: http://thoughts.overstimulate.... - Laurence Gonsalves

My point is that feature creep is started before users ever get involved. There are lots of forces on the inside of a company to produce new features and to keep them in a product. It's very difficult as a product designer to defend one of the most important features of any product: simplicity of use. - Chris White

Feature-itis! run!! - Susan Beebe

For example, product marketing often uses other products for comparison. If they find competitors have features you don't , they often want them added regardless of the effect on product simplicity. You need a strong leader to prevent this effect over time. - Chris White

Improve don't remove :) - directeur via NoiseRiver

Quick! Robert is already crying some of the missing feature in the iPhone version! :) - directeur via NoiseRiver

Congratulations! - Bill Hooker

Jonathan, you should title one of those upcoming PLoS papers "Tree of Life" and we'll all link to it and cite it feverishly! http://is.gd/Kxk - Duncan Hull

You may not worry about having the term "Tree of Life" lost to Hollywood, but when the next Angelina Jolie movie is titled Nodalpoint lets see what you do .. - Jonathan Eisen

yes, that wouldn't be good. Speaking of nodalpoint, I'm surprised Bosco Ho http://boscoh.com and Greg Tyrelle http://tyrelle.net aren't to be found wasting time on friendfeed... we should invite them to join the party... - Duncan Hull

"Wasting time"?? I resemble that remark! - Bill Hooker

We actually stole Nodalpoint from William Gibson. As for Greg, ironically for a web pioneer, he maintains almost no web presence whatsoever. Too busy in the Taiwanese corporate biotech sector. - Neil Saunders

Unfortunately http://www.nodalpoint.org seems to be either not responding or redirecting to Melbourne IT services http://www.flickr.com/photos/d... I've emailed greg... - Duncan Hull

"Willighagen E( 9 publications) est victorieux avec 4 publications de plus que Lindenbaum P ( 5 publications)." :) Sorry, just could not resists :) - Egon Willighagen

Oh, this is a clear example that citation count is way too simplistic ... - Egon Willighagen

:-)) - Pierre

I wonder what many a PI would say about such a system - Deepak

"am-I-hot-or-not" for scientists? - dekay

No, a social science-impact factor. - Egon Willighagen

isn't that exactly what the science citation index is about? just without the web2.0 shebang and only people from the same field vote by citation? - dekay

No, because a citation can be anything... "have you seen this crappy research? I just cite it as related work we 'improve' on"... citations do not provide ranking information. Or? - Egon Willighagen

The only thing you'd get by doing this is who's in the news, not impact or quality. Assessment of quality is such a complicated task that it has to be personally done by competent individuals who are familiar with the work of the individual in question. This takes a significant effort which can't be captured by this shallow of an approach, and the results are only useful within each narrow field of research. Systems like this are also extremely vulnerable to gaming. - Mr. Gunn

Since a significant effort is already put into grant reviews, you could simply average across grant review scores to capture this, and weight it by the size of the grant awarded. Then the confounding factor is the cost of research among disciplines. But, if you just want a "name recognition index", your method would be fine. - Mr. Gunn

Mr. Gunn... it seems you have more experience in this than I do. It's a shame that we do not seem to be able to do better than current systems. - Egon Willighagen

I really don't have any personal experience, I've just spent a couple years listening to the smart people who do. How you do it depends on what you're looking to do, obviously. A name recognition index could be useful, if only to find out who the attention whores are. ;-) - Mr. Gunn

Another problem -- "Hooker CW ( 21 publications ) est victorieux avec 12 publications de plus que Willighagen E ( 9 publications)" -- that a working Researcher ID could solve. (I don't have 21 publications!) - Bill Hooker

I'm waiting for the ResearcherID talk to be subsumed into the larger OpenID conversation. Anonymity is impossible nowadays, so maybe people will start taking online identity seriously now. - Mr. Gunn

I really believe that any identity namespace requires some granularity, one than can be linked with researcher id's and the like. What we don't want to do is reinvent the wheel and come up with some other, random standard for scientific identity - Deepak

What is the value of a unidimensional ranking of people, based on whatever single 'summary statistic' or 'impact factor'? Isn't this bound to be an unacceptable reduction in most of the cases? - Thomas Lemberger

Thomas, you just said what it took me 1000+ characters to say. I think this community has a pro-measurement bias, and the more measurements the better, as long as they're not used where inappropriate. I worry about mission creep much like we've seen with FICO scores in the US. - Mr. Gunn

Thomas Lemberger - When you're hiring (or awarding grants) there's simply no alternative: you're trying to rank applicants one against the other, and effectively end up with a rank order. - Michael Nielsen

Bill is right - I'm still an advocate of the general purpose wiki (Wikispaces in my case) for an online lab notebook. I know it isn't sexy and doesn't seem "cutting edge" but what is does well is let us represent pretty much whatever we need to record for experiments with the fewest assumptions. It is BECAUSE it is like paper that it works. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Jean-Claude: I noticed MediaWiki has some "forms" extensions, where users can create forms which fill out a template (like Semantic Forms). If this was simple enough to use, do you think this could be good hybrid approach between free-form and structured data in a wiki-based ELN ? For example, the powerusers could build forms+templates for standard experiments, which everyone could use. Extra data could be added to the wiki page after it was created from the forms+template. - Andrew Perry

Nice ideas Andrew. A few of the popular wikis have these form plugins (pmwiki, dokuwiki, mediawiki). I've thought before that they might provide a good environment for developing ELNs, LIMS and so on, but never had time (or sufficient positive feedback from potential users) to follow up. - Neil Saunders

There is one very good example of a Wiki-based production quality LIMS system (I haven't used it, but know folks who've taken a look at it). That's the WikiLims system from BioTeam ... so it's definitely doable http://blog.bioteam.net/tag/wi... - Deepak

WikiLims looks interesting; also a presentation here http://www.slideshare.net/gues.... I guess for wikis to work in this way, we need low barriers for developers and sufficient flexibility in the wiki backend. Otherwise you may as well code up your own web app in whatever language you know best. - Neil Saunders

That's definitely one of the plus points of MediaWiki. It seems fairly extensible - Deepak

Most of you know I'm part of the OWW team. So let me ask this question: Those that have used or seen OWW's lab notebook, what would you like to see added (or removed!) from it to make it more to your liking? As it has been said, MW is extensible and we are getting good at extending it, so let me know what you'd like and we can see what's possible. - Ricardo Vidal

I only keep a ELN. It's closed ;-0 It's dokuwiki install with a few modifications and plugins. As I spend all my time at the computer I have found this a lot better than writing/printing/cutting/pasting. I started of using mediawiki but had problems getting the 3rd party plugins (gnuplot, math etc.) to function. 2 of 12 in our lab use an ELN fulltime. I'm unsure of the Universities policy on ELN's, but i'm not concerned given that 2 Masters students just submitted without keeping any formal documentation. - Mitchell J Stanton-Cook

That's another good point; many wikis have some great plugins for research (when they work): plotting, formulae, BibTeX and so on. My "ELN" is basically a Trac + SVN installation, since most of what I do is generate file revisions (code, input/output, papers in LaTeX). It's "semi-open" in that parts of it are browse-able but file view requires authentication: https://predikin.biosci.uq.edu.... - Neil Saunders

Added wiki + forms = LIMS/ELN etc etc idea to Biogang projects: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Bi... - Neil Saunders

The other thing I like about the wiki is the discussion page. Supervisors/PI's can read and make comments at their own leisure. I would love to have "virtual meetings" on my ELN - that way when it comes up "what ! you did it that way !?!?!" "But we spoke about that.." "No we didn't..." situations are eliminated. - Mitchell J Stanton-Cook

Neil: What about those of us absolutely unable to "code up your own web app" in any language at all? We need someone to make those templates for us... - Heather

Ricardo: I definitely would like the content of each lab notebook *entry* to be searchable. For some reason, this <sitesearch>title=Search this Project</sitesearch> only seems to search within the page titles, at least for me. I'd also like a way to make image entry possible from within the pages one is editing (ie. a notebook page), the way Wordpress does when you are making a blog post. I might be asking for the moon... - Heather

@Heather - by "you", I mean "programmers", obviously! A good thing about wikis is that they are accessible to anyone. If a programmer wants to make them do more, they have to decide whether learning how to hack the wiki is a good use of their time and how extensible the wiki software is. The question is: how many wikis offer this extensive customisation? For a web developer, it can be faster just to code in what they know than learn a new framework. - Neil Saunders

@Ricardo: I signed up for a lab notebook just to play with it (my boss is very conservative, I can't use it for anything real...yet) and managed to break it by including an apostrophe in my "lab" name. I got email from the dude who looks after the notebooks, but he never did get around to fixing what I messed up... - Bill Hooker

Andrew - in a sense we use "templates" on the Wikispaces notebook since students often copy a previous similar experiment and delete the unrelated stuff. - Jean-Claude Bradley

Mitchell - one of my favorite features on the online notebook is being able to point out problems or ask questions directly on the page in bold and italics. When the students address the issues they can remove my comment. I have found this to be much more useful than the discussion tool since it is much harder to point to the exact section in the text. - Jean-Claude Bradley

@Bill I'll fix it up and let you know via email. - Ricardo Vidal

@Heather I believe that the search is working properly. It performs a restricted search within your lab notebook. As for the images, you can add images inside but I see what you are looking for. It is totally possible and I'll suggest it to be implemented :-) - Ricardo Vidal

Sorry to trouble you, but I don't get why it doesn't. Not browser-dependent... for example, if I search http://www.openwetware.org/wik... for the string "Sophie", I get this message: There is no page titled "Sophie +"Etchevers:Notebook/Genomics of hNCC" -"Lab Notebook"". - Heather

@Heather, you are right. It was buggy and we're fixing it. MW's search sucks and we're making it better via Google. It should be working better later today. - Ricardo Vidal

Thanks Ricardo. No hurry, mind you, since I'll only be playing. But of all the ELNs I've looked at, OWW is the only one that comes with a community, so I'd really like to give it a good workout before considering others. - Bill Hooker

@Bill, I'll let you know once your playground notebook is fixed. Meanwhile, you can fool around with this demo one: http://openwetware.org/wiki/Us... - Ricardo Vidal

I also deleted any previous answers that had been entered so far, because I wasn't clear about how the data would be used. So if you've filled out the survey once, and are happy about your data being released, you'll need to do it again. - Michael Barton

re-posted the form on my blog. - Pierre

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... should be enough to figure if you're covered. Data is anonymous and if everyone who takes place understands the data is to be released, not sure what the problem would be - Daniel Swan via twhirl

Cheers Dan. :) - Michael Barton

Michael, for Nationality, should I put "American" or "United States"? "American" is geographically (though not practically) ambiguous. Too bad those fields aren't drop-down boxes so the input is standardized and idiot proof. :-( - Chris Lasher

re-posted the survey as well. - Pedro Beltrao

I've only studied bioinformatics briefly but should be eligible to fill out the survey and I may be able to forward this to some researchers I know - Julian Baldwin

Has E-Bay really stagnated and failed? Yahoo looks to be in more jeopardy because they haven't expanded with services hat equal those of GOOG. - Michael VanDervort via Alert Thingy

Ok, now corrected to say what I meant :) - Vlado Handziski

creative use of Google Trends + 1. Interesting grouping Digg in there, that will undoubtedly upset some people. I would have used Pownce, Kevin seems more forgiving when you attack that, after all even he can see the fail train when its running. - Duncan Riley

Can't agree that Yahoo! has really failed, either. Failed at what? They've still got a bunch of properties that are used by many millions every day. :shrug: - Brent Newhall