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This post, while only 48 hours old is somewhat outdated by these two Friendfeed discussions. This was written independently of those discussions so it seemed worth putting out in its original form rather than spending too much time rewriting.
I wrote recently about Sciencefeed, a Friendfeed like system aimed at scientists and was fairly critical. I also promised to write about what I thought a “Friendfeed for Researchers” should look like. To look at this we need to think about what Friendfeed, and other services including Twitter, …

I had the great pleasure and privilege of announcing the launch of the Panton Principles at the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest on Saturday. The Panton Principles aim to articulate a view of what best practice should be with respect to data publication for science. Where we found agreement was that for science, and for scientific data, and particularly science funded by public investment, that the public domain was the best approach and that we would all recommend it.

I have long been an advocate of Friendfeed as a great tool for researchers. Here I discuss the new Friendfeed clone built for researchers, ScienceFeed, suggest what it is good for and what its weaknesses are.

Image by dullhunk via Flickr

One of the great things about being invited to speak that people don’t often emphasise is that it gives you space and time to hear other people speak. And sometimes someone puts together a programme that means you just have to shift the rest of the world around to make sure you can get there. Lisa Green and Hope Leman have put together the biggest concentration of speakers in the Open Science space that I think I have ever seen for the Science Commons Symposium – Pacific Northwest …

Image by Gideon Burton via Flickr

It hasn’t been a real good week for peer review. In the same week that the Lancet fully retract the original Wakefield MMR article (while keeping the retraction behind a login screen – way to go there on public understanding of science), the main stream media went to town on the report of 14 stem cell scientists writing an open letter making the claim that peer review in that area was being dominated by a small group of people blocking the publication of innovative work. …

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Which is not to say that I am any good at software engineering, good practice, or writing decent code. And you shouldn’t take Greg to task for some of the dodgy demos I’ve done over the past few months either. What he does need to take the credit for is enabling me to go from someone who knew nothing at all about software design, the management of software development or testing to being able to talk about these things, ask some of the right questions, and even begin …