If you’ve been around either myself or Deepak Singh you will almost certainly have heard the Jeff Jonas/Jon Udell soundbite: ‘Data finds data. Then people find people’. The naïve analysis of the success of consumer social networks and the weaknesses of science communication has lead to efforts that almost precisely invert the Jonas/Udell concept. In the case of most of these “Facebooks for Scientists” the idea is that people find people, and then they connect with data through those people. But what if we built social networks for data, where they could interact, find neighbours, and play games amongst themselves?

Image by cameronneylon via Flickr

This post, while only 48 hours old is somewhat outdated by these two Friendfeed discussions.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 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.

…is that someone needs to make money out of them. It was inevitable at some point that Friendfeed would take a route that lead it towards mass adoption and away from the needs of the (rather small) community of researchers that have found a niche that works well for them. I had thought it more likely that Friendfeed would gradually move away from the aspects that researchers found attractive rather than being absorbed wholesale by a bigger player but then I don’t know much about how Silicon Valley really works. …

A couple of weeks ago there was a significant fracas over Daniel MacArthur‘s tweeting from a Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory meeting.  This was followed in pretty quick succession by an article in Nature discussing the problems that could be caused when the details of presentations no longer stop at the walls of the conference room and all of these led to a discussion (see also friendfeed discussions) about how to make it clear whether you are happy or not with your presentation being photographed, videoed, or live blogged. A couple …

There has been a lot written and said recently about the “real time” web most recently in an interview of Paul Buchheit on ReadWriteWeb. The premise is that if items and conversations are carried on in “real time” then they are more efficient and more engaging. The counter argument has been that they become more trivial. That by dropping the barrier to involvement to near zero, the internal editorial process that forces each user to think a little about what they are saying, is lost generating a stream of drivel. …

On Monday I am speaking as part of a meeting on Use Cases for Provenance (Programme), which has a lot of interesting talks scheduled. I appear to be last. I am not sure whether that means I am the comedy closer or the pre-dinner entertainment. This may, however, be as a result of the title I chose:
In your worst nightmares: How experimental scientists are doing provenance for themselves
On the whole experimental scientists, particularly those working in traditional, small research groups, have little knowledge of, or interest in, the issues …

Euan Adie has asked for some help to do further analysis on the comments made on PLoS ONE articles. He is doing this via crowd sourcing through a specially written app at appspot to get people to characterize all the comments in PLoS ONE. Euan is very good at putting these kind of things together and again this shows the power of Friendfeed as a way of getting the message out. Dividing the job up into bite sized chunks so people can help even with a little bit of time, …

I love Stephen Sondheim musicals. In particular I love the way he can build an ensemble piece in which there can be 10-20 people onstage, apparently singing, shouting, and speaking complete disconnected lines, which nonetheless build into a coherent whole. Into the Woods (1987) contains many brilliant examples of the thoughts, fears, and hopes of a whole group of people building into a coherent view and message (see the opening for a taste and links to other clips). Those who believe in the wisdom of crowds in its widest sense …

Coming from me that may sound a strange title, but while I am very positive about the potential for online tools to improve the way we communicate science, I sometimes despair about the irritating little barriers that constantly prevent us from starting to achieve what we might. Today I had a good example of that.
Currently I am in Sydney, a city where many old, and some not so old friends live. I am a bit rushed for time so decided the best way to catch up was to propose a …