Spliced feed for The Science Network

Lounging with a Sumo [SciScoop Science Blog]

Posted:

Andrew at Sumolounge.com sent me one of their giant beanbags to review and perhaps mention on the site. I spent a few days lolling around in the TV room with it, manipulating it into different shapes and trying to persuade my wife to come and share it...

Science Blogging 2008 [Sciencebase Science Blog]

Posted: 03 Sep 2008 09:02 AM CDT

First off, just to say thanks to everyone who made sciblog2008 possible, already looking forward to its successor ScienceOnline2009. It was fun to put faces to names of many of my fellow science bloggers and others out there who were at the Ri on Saturday. Quite amazing how so many look as young as their avatars! The conference, the breakouts and the unconference were fun and informative albeit if a certain keynote speaker was wont to use rather too many expletives (is that how conferences are these days?)

Anyway, speaking of how conferences are “these days” it was interesting to see just how much of the interaction at the conference went on online - through liveblogging - even between delegates sitting in the same room. Funny to see someone type and another raise an eyebrow in response. It was a bit like passing secret notes around the classroom, except the whole science blogosphere beyond the hallowed halls of the Royal Institution [why cerise seatcovers, why?] was reading those notes.

In particular, several bloggers were commentating on happenings via the sciblog08 FeedFriend room. Me, I didn’t even have my mobile phone switched on the whole day (it was Saturday, after all). I’ve no intention of duplicating the efforts of those Feedfriends nor of the various Nature bloggers and staff who have reported, blogged, and podcast the event and will soon be vidcasting it. Great logo by the way Euan, been there, done that, got the teeshirt.

However, I do want to raise the possibility of a mashup that occurred to me during the unconference thread on tracking conversations through the blogosphere. Cameron Neylon mentioned researchblogging.org (previously known as BPR3.org), and their DOI-citation capture system. Egon Willighagen and others mentioned Chemical Blogspace (Cb) and Adie’s Postgenomic (Pg) together with the Zemanta plugin and Mozilla Ubiquity. Willighagen has already written a post-conference script to act as a handler for DOIs, I see.

But, it was
the
unconference discussion
that got me thinkingit was the unconference discussion that got me thinking that a science-specialised version of Zemanta and/or Ubiquity could monitor your latest blog post and on the basis of the names and keywords it sees as you type could suggest likely literature references. It would be a straightforward matter to display the titles of all relevant papers and as you blog you could add a star to the main paper about which you’re righting and tick any others that might be worth citing in the post.

A blog plugin could then fetch the researchblogging.org formated reference and paste into the foot of the blog post automatically, perhaps flagging your post once you hit “publish” in Connotea too. This way you would not have to remember to visit researchblogging.org nor have to be able to locate the DOI for pasting into their citation wizard the Science-based Zemanta tool would do the job for you.

Science Blogging 2008

Would biobank sharing lead to cures for diseases? [Earth & Sky Podcast]

Posted: 03 Sep 2008 04:09 AM CDT

“A biobank for research on humans is a repository that stores and distributes and maintains DNA, tissue, blood, blood serum, bone tissue – anything that would be useful in studying human biology,” said expert Greg Simon. Hear why he thinks it’s important for biobanks to share resources.