Our slow rollout over the last few weeks has been very successful. Thank you to everyone who made a comment. They were all helpful.

We will be expanding the rollout over the next week and hope to have a lot more traffic. So, hello to our new visitors. Read about us by following this blog or reading some of our white papers.

We plan to add some more reading material shortly. These are very exciting times and we look forward to discussing them with some of you shortly.

by Joi

[Update: after thinking about it overnight, the main take away I got from Shirky's talk was examining media in a different fashion. It is too easy to just look at Web 2.0 as just normal media taken online. But the Web is not TV and will have its own way of connecting  people.  In the end, it will be the people in a community that determine the network's utility/importance, not the media and not corporations. So listen to what the community wants, not what the hype says.]

Just got back from Shirky’s talk. He is a very engaging speaker. No slides. Just very different points of view that require you to alter your perspective. There has been some discussion of Shirky’s new book ‘Here Comes Everybody’ at Bench Marks that invites some thought.

Interestingly, he directly answered the ‘people with too much time’ meme. His point was that one of the huge aspects of the last 50 years is that almost everyone has too much time. It has been spent watching TV and consuming.

He stated that 100 million hours of human thought produced Wikipedia. We spend 100 million hours every weekend just watching ads on TV. Which one wastes the most time?

According to Shirky, those who say Web 2.0 approaches as being used by people with too much time ignore the fact that virtually everyone has too much time today. That is, there is a culture-wide cognitive surplus that, until recently, was filled by TV and consumerism. What happens if some of this is harnessed?

Shirky mentioned the inability of modern media to accurately describe what is happening. It sees anyone who is not watching mass media or consuming as a waste. But TV is really the waste.

New technologies now allow people to also produce and to share. He stated that even if a very small fraction of the total amount of time spent watching TV, say 10%, was utilized, it could result in 10,000 wikipedia sized projects a year. His point here was that even if people are playing World of Warcraft that it is a better use of their time than watching TV.

Now, according to Sturgeon’s law, 90% of the stuff produced and shared will be crud, because 90% of everything is crud. But to throw out that 10% because the rest is hype or echo chamber is a mistake. That is still about 1,000 wikipedia-sized projects a year.

Just as we had to get through My Mother the Car to finally see Battlestar Galactica, we may have to deal with some online crud. But, a social network will not gain much unless it serves the needs of the community. So echo chamber blogs will not really have much impact as they seal themselves away from anything that breaks the echo. Blogs as cults will not be very sustainable nor have much impact.

On re-reading the article by Brabazon, I think she is concentrating on something that was not at all the focus of Shirky’s book. If so, that is somewhat unfair. Or perhaps she found a blind spot in his discussions. But that may not invalidate what he has to say. What her article and Shirky’s talk have accomplished is that I may have to read the book to figure it out for myself. Score another victory for consumerism.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by Jef Poskanzer

I’m traveling to the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Over 8000 people attended the first one last year. I hope to have some interesting things to say about the meeting. I have been to several put on by O’Reilly and they are uniformly excellent.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

Well, Science 2.0 must be the next full release after Science 1.5.b13, right? Not quite. It takes its lead from applying Web 2.0 approaches to scientific research. So, what is Web 2.0?

In 2005, Tim O’Reilly described in detail what he meant by Web 2.0. Since then, there has been a lot of discussion on just what this means, if anything. So, I am going to add my own two bits to the mix. There really are not many technical differences between Web 1.0 and 2.0. The differences come from how they are used, and how usable they are.

Web 1.0 is static. Web 2.0 is dynamic.

As mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Web 2.0, Web 1.0 was about displaying information. Web 2.0 is about conversations, about participation in the flow of information.

Web 2.0 uses many new approaches for dealing with information including wikis, weblogs, syndication, aggregators, RSS, podcasts, forums and mashups. These often require the active participation of users. They have been used to create hugely popular social media sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, where the very content seen by all is created totally by the users. User-generated content.
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by aussiegall
Web 2.0: Building the New Library
[Via Ariadne]

Paul Miller wrote this over 2 years ago but it amply describes the effects of new approaches will have on an area that lives by dispersing information. It is not the technology that will make a difference. It is an attitude, one that is almost as old as humankind.

Sharing helps the entire team, tribe or town. The collective intelligence of the group is only strong when the umber of information chokepoints is low.

Paul’s Principles of Web 2.0, as discussed here, still apply in almost any endeavor that must deal with information to succeed. Here they are:

• Web 2.0 presages a freeing of data, allowing it to be exposed, discovered and manipulated in a variety of ways distinct from the purpose of the application originally used to gain access.
• Web 2.0 permits the building of virtual applications, drawing data and functionality from a number of different sources as appropriate.
• Web 2.0 is participative.
• Web 2.0 applications work for the user.
• Web 2.0 applications are modular, with developers and users able to pick and choose from a set of interoperating components in order to build something that meets their needs.
• Web 2.0 is about sharing: code, content, ideas.
• Web 2.0 is about communication and facilitating community.
• Web 2.0 is about remix.
• Web 2.0 is smart.
• Web 2.0 opens up the Long Tail.
• Web 2.0 is built upon Trust.

Technorati Tags: Knowledge Creation, Technology, Web 2.0

TGIF: Davidson Seamount:

[Via Deep Sea News]

I’ve been fiddling around with the formatting for the YouTube videos. Looks like it is working.

This is an excellent example of what can be done to spread science around. Nice graphics and an interesting story.

Technorati Tags: General, Science

by jeffpearce
Progress toward Public Access to Science:
[Via PLoS Biology: New Articles]

PLoS Chairman of the Board Harold Varmus applauds the newly enacted NIH public access policy as a positive step toward ensuring greater access to and better use of the scientific literature.

This very nicely discusses some of the recent changes that are making Open Access to scientific information a going concern. Anyone receiving money from NIH has to deposit the accepted manuscripts into PubMed Central and allow freely available viewing within 12 months.

He also mentions the continuing problem of copyright. Many journals require the authors to turn over all rights to the journal in order to have the paper published. This is becoming a problem in the Web 2.0 world, since the concerns of the author do not often match those of the publisher.

As Varmus writes:

Finally, unless authors modify their copyright agreements with journals before publication—something they are urged to do—journals will continue to retain inappropriate control over the use of their articles, which is currently confined largely to reading online for most articles in PMC.

Harvard has recently addressed this. Faculty members must grant a non-exclusive license to the University for it to post on a website it maintains, one that is open and free. Faculty can opt out of this on a case by case basis if the journal will not permit this.
Varmus comments:

Moreover, the nuisance of writing to the Provost every time a desired journal refuses to conform to the Harvard policy may cause faculty members to rethink their choice of venue, thereby minimizing use of the “opt-out” option.

The journals make their reputation based on the reputations of its author scientists. If a journal has a restrictive copyright policy, these scientists may go elsewhere, putting pressure on the journal to adopt more open access.

This story is not over yet. But it has the potential to revolutionize scientific publishing. Stay tuned.

Technorati Tags: Education, Science, Web 2.0

by Vik Nanda

Rethinking Outreach: Teaching the Process of Science through Modeling:
[Via PLoS Biology: New Articles]

How can we get high school students interested in science? Here is a program that matches students with researchers, with the purpose of building a physical model of the protein being investigated in the lab.
What an outstanding idea! Not only did these students learn a great deal about how research is actually done but they also were instrumental in helping the researcher have some of the tools he needed.

These sorts of interactions will always be needed. Humans like to interact personally with others. But, Web 2.0 technologies can make it easier for these sorts of interactions to take place. Meetup is a great example of this.

There are already hints that scientific meetings may take a similar path. Again, not to replace the conferences already taking place but as an adjunct.

Update: Of course, Web 2.0 approaches can also expand the reach of teaching and communications. A great example was the recent EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Online Focus Session.

Technorati Tags: Education, General, Open Access, Technology

by vulture1960


We should have a working contact page now, with a form to send an email to us, without anyone having to worry about spam. So feel free to drop us a line.

by kevindooley

We are up. It appears that everything is working. All the tweaks seem to be working.

Technorati Tags: General