by fdecomite
More on bloggers and OA:
[Via Open Access News]
Bora Zivkovic, ResearchBlogging.org, v.2.0, A Blog Around the Clock, August 29, 2008.

… [W]e took a little look [at the new release of ResearchBlogging.org] at the PLoS HQ and noticed that out of 87 pages of ‘all results’ there are 8 pages of ‘PLoS’ results – implying that about 10% of all the [ResearchBlogging.org] posts are on PLoS papers from all seven journals – and of those, 4 pages are just on PLOS ONE papers – which is about 5%. All I can say is w00t! for Open Access – when bloggers can read, bloggers will write.

ResearchBlogging demonstrates how blogging can be used to disburse information. The individual writers serve as excellent filters. It is like a journal club online, providing a way to cut through some of the jargon in a paper and see what its real relevance is.

It is one step above “Hey, did you see the paper in the latest Blood about X?” Now when an interesting paper is found, a short synopsis, with the proper attribution is available to a large network.

Technorati Tags: Science, Social media, Web 2.0

by cadmanof50s
Science blogging is the new email:
[Via Gobbledygook]

The just finished conference Science Blogging 2008: London was a wonderful chance for real-life socialising networking. I started to upload some fotos to Flickr (e.g. Scott Keir explaining sign language, see all fotos tagged sciblog here), some of them are too embarrassing and I will keep them for bribes reference later on.

The meeting was also a great opportunity to think about where we are today with scienceblogging. Having a conference is a good sign that the field is evolving1, and you can see several subdisciplines evolving:

• conference blogging (also includes event blogging)
• edublogging
• metablogging (blogging about blogging, by far the largest discipline)
• research blogging (blogging about scientific experiments, the smallest discipline)
• investigational blogging (the keynote lecture by Ben Goldacre described this very well)
• evolution blogging (a large subdiscipline)
• news blogging (blogging about science news)
• watercooler blogging (small pieces of interesting or funny thoughts/pictures)
• summary blogging (summarizing other blog posts and linking to them)
• diary blogging (blogging as a personal diary of self-expression)
• hoax blogging (see this example by Jonathan Eisen)

[More]

This is a pretty interesting framing of the use of blogs for research. A lot of useful scientific inquiry is informal in nature, occurring around a coffee machine or at a pub. Blogs just allow people who do not share the same time or place to participate. And in a more useful fashion than email.

Technorati Tags: Science, Web 2.0

by freeparking
London Science Blogging Conference on Friendfeed:
[Via Confessions of a Science Librarian]

Boy, do I ever love Friendfeed.

You can follow what’s going on at today’s London Science Blogging Conference in its very own Friendfeed room. Each session has it’s own thread with multiple people commenting on the proceedings. It actually gives a very good and surprisingly understandable impression of what’s going on in the sessions. Most of the sessions have dozens of comments. Check it out.

You can also check me out on Friendfeed (join, you won’t regret it). Michael Nielsen has also created a room for the upcoming Science in the 21st Century conference.

As a sort of aggregator of one’s life, FriendFeed can be especially useful for all sorts of ad hoc social meetings, such as conferences. I wonder what the ‘room’ looks like for a really large conference, the 10,000 attending ones? I’ll be sure and check out the Science in the 21st Century room.

Technorati Tags: Open Access, Science, Web 2.0

Workflow- Social Media School Teacher:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Dharmesh wakes up a little late. After a quick shower, he skips checking email, but goes right to his RSS reader to see updates of where the students worked within the social network. Luckily, Ning (and lots of services) send new activities out via RSS, so they’re easy to track.

It looks like Margarite has added more YouTube videos to the video section, and Franklin has written a blog post about the town’s historic water cooler. Jeremy has already commented that Franklin forgot to cite a source, saving Dharmesh the effort. He eats a breakfast bar, and hops in his car for the commute to work.

On his iPod, Dharmesh listens to last week’s book reports read out by the students. The quality of their work has improved a great deal since switching to the audio requirement. The second report, by Kelly, is a little loud and the audio clips a bit. Dharmesh makes a mental note to show Kelly how to level the audio in Audacity.

[More]

Photo credit, LizMarie

These are pretty interesting representations of what the day might be like in a Web 2.0 world. Chris has a couple others – a minister and a marketer. They are nice ways to visualize the possibilities.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by 416style
Beware of the Overload:
[Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog]
Information overload is a real problem as we develop new work processes to deal with it. At the moment, email takes the brunt, often serving as a catch basin for all types of data. This not only makes it inefficient, it makes it even more difficult to work through the large amounts of data that are usually included. Making the tools we already use more efficient in our workflow is critical.

Here we have a discussion of how one might do that. The Enterprise 2.0 blogs always has some interesting points.

Staying afloat in the depths of one’s email is a daily struggle for most of us. It’s difficult to carve out time to devote to other time consuming projects. Luckily there are collaborative tools that can help ease the strain. But just as important as the existence of the tools is the best practices associated with them. Here are a few I came up with:

1. A community can’t be force fed. It needs to take on an organic growth and naturally evolve. As a bottom-up movement, the members of the community shouldn’t need outside motivation to contribute. The benefits of membership should speak for themselves.

This is often true of a mature community and its tools. However, often the community needs some active gardening, particularly in the early stages, in order to become self-sufficient. This acts to increase the rate of diffusion of innovation for these tools.

While the benefits should speak for themselves, there is an element of internal marketing that often needs to be provided. IBM’s data indicate that corporate-wide initiatives have strong impacts on the creation and retention of new blogs. Care just must be taken to be sure that these sorts of top-down approaches do not hamper the bottom-up needs of the tools.

2. Be considerate of existing processes. Don’t anticipate replacing your email client with a wiki (just yet).

This is an important point. None of these new tools and processes will really replace another one. They will just provide a more appropriate avenue for dealing with large amounts of information. A screwdriver does not replace a hammer.

3. Know which tool is most appropriate for the task at hand, and use accordingly. Don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole.

This is what is hampering email. Email is great for one-to-one communication where multiple forms of information (i.e. PDFs, photos, spreadsheets) can be moved between people. But is is not the best method for creating or distributing these to larger groups. Here, wikis serve a better purpose.

The goal is to make sure the tools are available. Too many communities only have round holes available. Thus the frustration.

4. Keep company policy top of mind when using tools. This policy should be communicated clearly. Removing a member’s post is justifiable, so long as the policy for what is appropriate content and what is not can be referenced as due cause.

Usually this only needs a light touch. If a company has done its job right, these sorts of policies will only be an extension of current corporate policy, such as appropriate emails. The community will fairly quickly determine what is really needed, particularly one that is already behind a firewall.

5. If you’re in management, be prepared to hear the truth – this may includes some things you don’t want to hear. A community is an excellent forum to spark debate and discuss issues business processes. It allows those in lower level positions the opportunity to have their voices heard.

This is a critical point. It is not that these tools create this voice. People already say these same things. The tools just make this discussion visible. Dealing with these truths will be an important skill to develop. The goal must be a more successful community and organization, not just to assign blame.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

Workflow- Social Media for Marketers:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

What does a day in the life of a social media marketer look like? I’m not a marketer, so if I get some of your terms wrong, forgive me. I thought maybe we could do a walkthrough of a fictitious social media marketer, Yolanda, for a small hotel group (four hotels) in Boston. I picked hotels just because otherwise I’d have picked a software company. Let’s walk through a workflow, and then reconstruct it in bullets at the end.

[More]

The rest is very interesting and provides a possible scenario for what the future might bring. Having people who are embedded in a community can be a tremendous asset for an organization. It sure sounds like a fun job.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

by Annie Mole
Technorati Doesnt Count Microblogs:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

Something Mack Collier just said rang a bell in my head: Technorati doesn’t count services like Twitter, Friendfeed, Plurk, Identi.ca, etc, as valid sources of traffic for a blog. Meaning, for the dozens of people who say that they find something interesting and share the link on Twitter, none of that goes towards whether a blog is authoritative.

Does that actually make sense? If we’re shifting as a user base into using services like Facebook, Twitter, and Jaiku more frequently (okay, not Jaiku), why wouldn’t Technorati, the current reigning source of “authority” of blogs on the web, count these sources?

Has Technorati become the Alexa of measurement?

Update: I guess Alexa counts FireFox now, too. Again, if you have the bar installed. Thanks for the update. (Note: Alexa, as far as I know, only counts users of the IE browser with the Alexa toolbar installed in its ratings of who visits your website, versus Compete and others who count much more.)

Technorati is a great place to get numbers about blogs, or to learn about what is reverberating around the blogosphere. But Twitter, Friendfeed and others provide alternative means for blog-like information to move freely.

How does a group know when to take on new areas and when not to? This is one os the critical questions we face today. An innovation organization that is not ready to answer that question almost every day may not be around long.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

The social media aggregation software, Friendfeed has much more value than one might originally think. The tool lets you add several disparate parts of your social web use into one spot (it collects your blog, your Flickr account, your upcoming.org event list, your bookmarks, etc).

Most people use this as a way to share a more enriched experience with friends and colleagues. But I think there’s a business opportunity in using the tool for collaborative business. Remember, Friendfeed can collect your status information, your presence, media from several sources, your bookmarks. There are many ways to use that. Here’s one set of use cases to consider for that purpose.
How to Use Friendfeed as a Collaborative Business Tool

Sign up for an account on Friendfeed.
On the”me” tab, on the right where it says “services,”click “Edit/add.”
Add appropriate accounts. (See below).

[More]

Friendfeed is a recently developed Web 2.0 tool. It will be interesting to see how it develops as a business tool.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

Inbox Taming for Busy People:
[Via chrisbrogan.com]

I’ve had my inbox at zero for over four weeks now ( Merlin Mann should be proud). I’ve learned that this helps my all around business processes, because to do this, I had to have a system to account for everything. The way I’ve managed it was a mix of David Allen’s Getting Things Done process, Stever Robbins’ You Are Not Your Inbox program, and simple figuring out what works and doesn’t work for me personally. I thought I’d share my process, in case it might be useful for you.

Most people do not have a really good plan for dealing with email. But it can make a huge difference in how effective email is for you. Chris has some great insights to get you started.

Technorati Tags: Social media, Web 2.0

by pheezy
The Pixar Principles. The Art of Collective Creativity:
[Via Creativity Central]

The Previews:

When I freelanced for Disney, they still required creatives to punch a time clock. Women with tight-fitting hair nets roamed the halls with coffee and doughnuts. And the circular dining hall was festooned with pictures of Walt and Roy and executives like Card Walker.

Chances are somewhere in that group of diners was John Lasseter. John was an animator who left Disney to become part of the computer division of Lucasfilm. Steve Jobs bought the fledging company and renamed it Pixar, a fake Spanish word meaning “to make pictures or pixels.”

Jobs, Lasseter and Dr. Ed Catmull overcame a roller-coaster of financial challenges and turned Pixar into a dream company. Ed Catmull isn’t a name most people don’t know outside of the animation world. At Pixar, he not only co-founded the company, he was the key developer of the RenderMan rendering system used in such films as Toy Story and Finding Nemo.

Recently, Catmull wrote a terrific article for the Harvard Business Review called “How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity.” His insights into developing a culture of collaboration and sustaining that culture are an important lesson for other creative organizations.

The Harvard Business Review article has the audio if you want to hear the whole thing.I wrote previously about Pixar in three posts entitled The Synthetic Organization part 1, part 2 and part 3. They discuss my view that Pixar may be a model for a new type of company, one based on many of the principles of Web 2.0 – openness, transparency, rapid diffusion of innovations.

This audio from the Ed Catmull is very useful. He wanted to create a creativity inspired company that is self-sustaining, that no longer needs the vision of a few people at the top to maintain innovation. Marty Baker at Creativity Central breaks some of this down. He presents the key insights:

Pixar’s Operating Principles can be distilled down to 3 principles.

1. Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone.

2. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas.

3. We must stay close to innovations happening in the academic community.

In addition, many decisions at Pixar take place in a social setting, with a level playing field. That is, there is no organizational chart when it comes to examining problems, the goal is to fix the problem not to assign blame.

Web 2.0 approaches work well in this sort of setting since it is hard to dominate a conversation simply because you are a VP. Everyone’s voice, their criticism, their suggestions, has a more equal standing than in a normal conference room. The lack of many of the non-verbal communications of status makes it easier for the goal of creativity to reached.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0