Web 2.0 Untangled: Lucy Power on life scientists online

The final speaker before lunch was Lucy Power (http://lucypower.com/about/, http://twitter.com/pownet), who talked about a group of life scientists on the cutting edge of Web 2.0.

The life scientists she followed were using Web 2.0 to communicate, collaborate and share their data. They were generally using pre-existing technology, but shaping it to their needs. She looked at 2 main trends:

FriendFeed http://friendfeed.com/ is a place where you can pull together all our your RSS feeds- it updates whenever you change your Facebook status, post on your blog, add photos to Flickr, and so on. People can then “like” your updates and comment on them, rather like on Facebook (which bought FriendFeed several years ago and took that idea from them). It also has groups, where people who share a common interest can chat to each other. The Life Scientists FriendFeed group is very active, with people using it to engage in informal but useful chat- asking questions about research techniques, sharing information about funding sources, and seeking collaborators for projects. It’s networking water-cooler chat, and potentially very useful.

Open Notebook Science is the idea of posting to a blog or wiki all your experiment results in real time onto the internet- publishing from the bench. It’s currently rare, and Lucy discussed several of the leading groups. It’s great as you can embed pictures, YouTube videos and so on. And it enables people world-wide to follow your results. But it can raise issues for journals, as some journals see it as pre-published work (and this can then have knock-on results for funding, promotion, etc).

(“Web 2.0 Untangled” was a day-long conference organised by CILIP’s UC&R BBO and CoFHE MidWest Circle, held at Wolfson College on the 24th November 2010. It featured 7 speakers on a variety of topics. I attended thanks to Oxford staff development funding. A condition of this funding is to write-up your experience of the session to pass around your colleagues in Oxford- which is what I'm doing here!)