science-social-network – Science in the Open

: Image by cameronneylon via Flickr

I’ve been watching the reflection on the Science Blogs diaspora and the wider conversation on what next for the Science Blogosphere with some interest because I remain both hopeful and sceptical that someone somewhere is really going crack the problem of effectively using the social web for advancing science. I don’t really have anything to add to Bora’s masterful summary of the larger picture but I wanted to pick out something that was interesting to me and that I haven’t seen anyone else mention.

Much of the reflection has focussed around what ScienceBlogs, and indeed Nature Network is, or was, good for as a place to blog. Most have mentioned the importance of the platform in helping to get started and many have mentioned the crucial role that the linking from more prominent blogs played in getting them an audience. What I think no-one has noted is how much the world of online writing has changed since many of these people started blogging. There has been consolidation in the form of networks and the growth of the internet as a credible media platform with credible and well known writers. At the same time, the expectations of those writers, in terms of their ability to express themselves through multimedia, campaigns, widgets, and other services has outstripped the ability of those providing networks to keep up. I don’t think it’s an accident that many of the criticisms of ScienceBlogs seem to be similar toÂ those of Nature Network when it comes to technical issues.

What strikes me is a distinctÂ parallelÂ between the networks and scientific journals (and indeed newspapers). One of the great attractions of the networks, even two or three years ago, was that the technical details of providing a good quality user experience were taken care of for you. The publication process was still technically a bit difficult for many people who just wanted to get on and write. Someone else was taking care of this for you. Equally the credibility provided by ScienceBlogs or the Nature name were and still are a big draw. The same way a journal provides credibility, the assumption that there is a process back there that is assuring quality in some way.

The world, and certainly the web, has moved on. The publication step is easy – as it is now much easier on the wider web. The key thing that remains is the link economy. Good writing on the web lives and dies by the links, the eyeballs that come to it, the expert attention that is brought there by trusted curators. Scientists still largely trust journals to apportion up their valuable attention, and people will still trust the front page of ScienceBlogs and others to deliver quality content. But what the web teaches us over and over again is that a single criterion for authority, to quality curation, to editing is not enough. In the same way that a journal’s impact factor cannot tell you anything about the quality of an individual paper, a blog collective or network doesn’t tell you anything much about an individual author, blog, or piece of writing.

The future of writing on the web will be more diverse, more federated, and more driven by trusted and selective editors and discoverers who will bring specific types of quality content into my attention stream. Those looking for “the next science blogging network” will be waiting a while because there won’t be one, at least not one that is successful. There will be consolidation, there will larger numbers of people writing for commercial media outlets, both old and new, but there won’t be a network because the network will the web. What there will be, somehow, sometime, and I hope soon will be a framework in which we can build social relationships that help us discover content of interest from any source, and that supports people to act as editors and curators to republish and aggregate that content in new and interesting ways. That won’t just change the way people blog about science, but will change the way people communicate, discover, critique, and actually do science.

Like Paulo Nuin said, the future of scientific blogging is what it has always been. It’s just writing. It’s always just been writing. That’s not the interesting bit. The interesting bit is that how we find what we want to read is changing radically…again. That’s where the next big thing is. If someone figures out please tell me. I promise I’ll link to you.

Title of this post is liberally borrowed from some of Richard Grant’s of which the most recent was the final push it took for me to actually write it.

Good-bye ScienceBlogs, and Thank You [The Primate Diaries] (scienceblogs.com)
Who Will Read Your Excellent Science Blog Writing? (scienceblogs.com)
Why Eric Johnson is leaving ScienceBlogs (andrewspittle.net)
Bora leaves ScienceBlogs with superb history and analysis of science blogging (scienceblogs.com)
#IOweBora, do you? [DrugMonkey] (scienceblogs.com)
ScienceBlogs: What if… [Dot Physics] (scienceblogs.com)

: Image via CrunchBase

I have been saying for quite some time that I think Friendfeed offers a unique combination of functionality that seems to work well for scientists, researchers, and the people they want to (or should want to) have conversations with. For me the core of this functionality lies in two places: first that the system explicitly supports conversations that centre around objects. This is different to Twitter which supports conversations but doesn’t centre them around the object – it is actually not trivial to find all the tweets about a given paper for instance. Facebook now has similar functionality but it is much more often used to have pure conversation. Facebook is a tool mainly used for person to person interactions, it is user- or person-centric. Friendfeed, at least as it is used in my space is object-centric, and this is the key aspect in which “social networks for science” need to differ from the consumer offerings in my opinion.Â This idea can trace a fairly direct lineage via Deepak Singh to the Jeff Jonas/Jon Udell concatenation of soundbites:

“Data finds dataâ€¦then people find people”

The second key aspect about Friendfeed is that it gives the user a great deal of control over what they present to represent themselves. If we accept the idea that researchers want to interact with other researchers around research objects then it follows that the objects that you choose to represent yourself is crucial to creating your online persona. I choose not to push Twitter into Friendfeed mainly because my tweets are directed at a somewhat different audience. I do choose to bring in video, slides, blog posts, papers, and other aspects of my work life. Others might choose to include Flickr but not YouTube. Flexibility is key because you are building an online presence. Most of the frustration I see with online social tools and their use by researchers centres around a lack of control in which content goes where and when.

So as an advocate of Friendfeed as a template for tools for scientists it is very interesting to see how that template might be applied to tools built with researchers in mind. ScienceFeed launched yesterday byÂ Ijad Madisch, the person behind ResearchGate. The first thing to say is that this is an out and out clone of Friendfeed, from the position of the buttons to the overall layout. It seems not to be built on the Tornado server that was open sourced by the Friendfeed team so questions may hang over scalability and architecture but that remains to be tested. The main UI difference with Friendfeed is that the influence of another 18 months of development of social infrastructure is evident in the use of OAuth to rapidly leverage existing networks and information on Friendfeed, Twitter, and Facebook. Although it still requires some profile setup, this is good to see. It falls short of the kind of true federation which we might hope to see in the future but then so does everything else.

In terms of specific functionality for scientists the main additions is a specialised tool for adding content via a search of literature databases. This seems to be adapted from the ResearchGate tool for populating a profile’s publication list. A welcome addition and certainly real tools for researchers must treat publications as first class objects. But not groundbreaking.

The real limitation of ScienceFeed is that it seems to miss the point of what Friendfeed is about. There is currently no mechanism for bringing in and aggregating diverse streams of content automatically. It is nice to be able to manually share items in my citeulike library but this needs to happen automatically. My blog posts need to come in as do my slideshows on slideshare, my preprints on Nature Precedings or Arxiv. Most of this information is accessible via RSS feeds so import via RSS/Atom (and in the future real time protocols like XMPP) is an absolute requirement. Without this functionality, ScienceFeed is just a souped up microblogging service. And as was pointed out yesterday in one friendfeed thread we have a twitter-like service for scientists. It’s called Twitter. With the functionality of automatic feed aggregation Friendfeed can become a presentation of yourself as a researcher on the web. An automated publication list that is always up to date and always contains your latest (public) thoughts, ideas, and content. In short your web-native business card and CV all rolled into one.

Finally there is the problem of the name. I was very careful at the top of this post to be inclusive in the scope of people who I think can benefit from Friendfeed. One of the great strengths of Friendfeed is that it has promoted conversations across boundaries that are traditionally very hard to bridge. The ongoing collision between the library and scientific communities on Friendfeed may rank one day as its most important achievement, at least in the research space. I wonder whether the conversations that have sparked there would have happened at all without the open scope that allowed communities to form without prejudice as to where they came from and then to find each other and mingle. There is nothing in ScienceFeed that precludes anyone from joining as far as I can see, but the name is potentially exclusionary, and I think unfortunate.

Overall I think ScienceFeed is a good discussion point, a foil to critical thinking, and potentially a valuable fall back position if Friendfeed does go under. It is a place where the wider research community could have a stronger voice about development direction and an opportunity to argue more effectively for business models that can provide confidence in a long term future. I think it currently falls far short of being a useful tool but there is the potential to use it as a spur to build something better. That might be ScienceFeed v2 or it might be an entirely different service. In a follow-up post I will make some suggestions about what such a service might look like but for now I’d be interested in what other people think.

Other Friendfeed threads are here and here and Techcrunch has also written up the launch.

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