DISQUS

Congratulations Dr Good :)

Actually Friendfeed is very usual (in contrast to Twitter). I am working in academic research and I use FriendFeed to keep track of what other researchers are reading and to participate in scientific discussions. I have seen many examples where it was helpful to solve problems in much the same way a forum would. There are currently around 640 scientists registered in the "The Life Scientists" friendfeed room.

That reminds me that I still did not make time to push on that open project ... hopefully when I get one project done in the new lab I will have an easier time convincing the boss that this is OK.

A slightly different angle is that the problems/big questions that can be more easily tackled given current technologies and foreseeable advances are not readily accessible. Exciting and clearly stated research agendas would attract this distributed research environment.

We might need slightly better tools to organize the projects but the critical aspect is right now is awareness. It would be great to be able to start a project and state the needed resources (people/skills/materials/etc). This should trigger an alert to anyone willing to provide this. Something like an RSS feed that I could subscribe to for tags that qualify the resources that I am willing to provide currently. This could slowly move the research agendas from the physical local institutes and universities to the web.

I'll be repeating myself but what I don't like about BPR3 has more to do with fragmentation of attention. It would be great to have a place like techmeme for science where a large fraction of science bloggers, scientists and maybe even journalists would read about the latest science news. The more aggregators there are the harder it will be to have a large network effect kicking in.

For science I think this "bursty work" is an excellent concept. To establish collaborations we are still very limited on the people around us in the institutes, the contacts we make in meetings or from our current/previous supervisors (real life stuff). I was just trying to set up a bioinformatics/evolution project in Google Code and in just a few weeks I got at least two other researchers interested in collaborating and a few others asking questions and correcting a few mistakes. I think trying out research ideas this way is very different from having a group leader thinking about a project and trying to sell it to the next PhD student or postdoc coming to the lab.

I had a quick look around but nothing grabbed my attention. The groups idea is nice but I prefer JournalFire or Scintilla. They could consider importing tagged data from Connotea and Citeulike to bootstrap it. I wonder if they can do this.

There are always differentiators. Just the fact that you are the fist to develop a new method in the lab, even if you fully describe the method when you publish it your still in the leading edge and that gives you an advantage in working with that method or in making improvements.
I don't really agree with that idea that once everyone known something that there is no longer a competitive advantage in knowing that. No person can know everything and what a person or group does with that shared public knowledge is strongly dependent on the groups background. I think that in a very open world of knowledge it becomes increasingly difficult to be original as an individual because it is likely that someone out there has the same knowledge and mindset and ideas. However, as a sum we should be collectively more creative. There are many more different melting pots and discussions over this shared knowledge.
Even the simple act of having open discussions about this shared knowledge can be of value. We can learn how to argue our positions, to spot weaknesses in logic etc from observation.

Don't forget how the group got that big ;). In any case it is difficult to get the average person to participate in most online activities. I remember an observation that someone made about the 1% rule of social sites. Only about 1% of people are active in most of these sites. I don't remember where I read it and this estimate could be off by now. Some sites are better than others in stimulating participation. Facebook is so far the best example from those that I have tried.
Going back to the questions. Aside from having a discussion on the daily challenges in bioinformatics as suggested by Keith and Neil in Neil's blog I would be interested also in some historical perspective from someone that has been in the field for a long time (ex Philip E. Bourne).

I will be moving to SF next year. One thing that I had in mind for the next years while I do the posdoc would be to find some way to get in touch with biotech people in the area. I like the academic world but I would at least like to understand better the potential and limitations of working in biotech.

The first time I checked the site it only allowed .edu email addresses. I sent an email asking for an account saying that I was in EMBL (embl.de) so I think that they are adding upon request. They also changed the login for invitation only so even if the domain is now accepted I can't create an account :).

I could not find the comment but to be clear what I think is that they will not launch new journals any time soon since they will probably be focusing on this re-grouping of content.The Hubs are not journals in the sense that we don't submit the manuscript to the Hubs. I hope they find some time and man power to allow for more user generated content in the Hubs. Some kind of "editorial" boards that can post the editorials and some Hubs that are created by the users. Some cross between Nodapoint, Digg and Nature Reports.

Now that they have ONE I don't know if they will open new journals any time soon :). More likely they will create portals based on the content in PLoS ONE. You can always try to create a journal in BioMed Central.

What I don't like about this fragmentation (specialization) is that these social sites work better the more people participate in them. So, the more fragmented the space the harder it will become to reach interesting levels of users. In all these social sites it would be best if the underlying important material would be shared, accessible to any other site. The competition between the sites could be on the user interface and not so much on who has the most tagged material or largest social network etc. I guess in tagging there are clear advantages to specialization. I don't want to go through all material in delicious if I am looking for new papers for example.

I just hope that the hype will not grow to a point were people forget how much the environment shapes the outcomes. When the "Craigome" came out in PLoS Biology all the sound clips in CNN were about how much we will be able to predict from our genomes etc. To make any sense of the SNP data a lot of cultural habits, diet information, etc will have to be collected as well. How comfortable will people be in centralizing this much information in a private company ?

They should let us have our names instead of those nicks if we wished too. Next time I will know your nick. I am not sure I will attend the next one since I will be away in a conference but I can try.

It was about 5 internet years ;) Google bought Yahoo in the meantime.

This is an interesting twist. Nature is mostly developing in house their new tools but maybe collaborating with start-ups would be an alternative way of building tools for publishers. The publishers provide the people (social graph) and content and the start-ups provide the tools.

Postgenomic missing - Here is a speculation ... they might want to keep postgenomic as independent (unbranded) as possible to be used by several publishers.

This is really interesting. I remember hearing about it somewhere about how they were storing scientific data for NASA or something of this sort but I did not know they were planning to expand this and make it available to all.

It could also be the stared items if we make them public. This is how I usually mark the posts I like in GReader.
I get the general interest. It goes into making group certification of content a lot easier. An abstraction of techmeme to any group of people. The great thing is that there are much more readers than bloggers that can come in and contribute with the editorial capacity without having to post to direct attention. It also helps to separate the two main functions of the blog, creating content and directing attention.

It looks like Blogger on draft is now providing a similar search feature. It automatically creates a Google Custom search from the blog content and what we linked. This is an interesting direction for people powered search. I am not sure how, but this could then feedback to the main Google search.

It is probably also a good way to find things that you know you read but not quite sure where. thanks for the trust :)

I like the insight part. How would we rate the usefulness of something like the discovery of RNA interference (just to give an extreme example) ? When we read it we know that it is something that other people should read, even it I am not going to use it immediately for my work. Sometimes we just want to say how far reaching this discovery can be and go tell the world about it. Some other times we can find it useful for a very small niche area. So I think the perceived impact, that comes before the use (although directly connected) is also important. We rely on impact factors for this today, but it would be better to evaluate the impact of individual papers from user ratings and of course usage values and citations.