M. Mitchell Waldrop has posted a draft version of an article called Science 2.0: Great New Tool, or Great Risk?. The article will appear in Scientific American (which, like the Nature Publishing Group, is owned by Mamillian). In this article he talks about the increasing use of Web 2.0 technologies in research. The largest part of the article is about Open Notebook Science and OpenWetWare in particular. But he also talks about science blogs and other Web 2.0 efforts such as Nature Network, which is mentioned briefly at the end of the article.
The draft article was posted online last week. In true Web 2.0 spirit, M. Mitchell Waldrop has invited readers to post comments and promised that he will use them for the final print version. I wrote a comment and suggested that the increasing role of Web 2.0 companies such as Google, Microsoft and Adobe in the online creation and distribution of science should be mentioned in the article.
Thanks Martin,
Yes I had seen the article but thanks to the above, I have now read it in full and indeed, left a comment.
I had been wondering what to write and wanted to see what others were saying first.
Where possible, I like to be short and to the point so my comment was simply:-
“Making anything new work requires a bit of risk-taking from everyone involved”
Graham,
I like your comment. Working in science involves a lot of risk-taking, as the outcome of most research projects is uncertain. At the same time, most scientists do not want to take the risks involved when adopting wikis, blogs and other Web 2.0 tools.
- Martin
When writing my blog post, I missed to important pieces of imformation. Corie Lok had already written about the Scientific American article a few days before in the Nature Network Boston Editor’s blog. And author Mitchell Waldrop is joining Nature next month.